The 20 revised full papers presented in this book together with 4 section surveys were carefully reviewed and selected from the papers contributed to the 14th International Conference on Applications of Prolog, INAP 2001, held in Tokyo, Japan, in October 2002. The papers are devoted to the four tightly interwoven aspects knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, knowledge processing, and knowledge distribution, all in the context of the World Wide Web; they are organized in topical sections on Web languages and logic, knowlege acquisition and knowledge representation, decision support by advanced logic programming, and Web-knowledge management and data mining. The book is targeted to designers and users of e-business systems and e-government systems, for IT professionals who build such systems, as well as for the wider audience interested in the technical background of knowledge processing for the Web.

High communication efforts and poor problem solving results due to restricted overview are two central issues in collaborative problem solving. This work addresses these issues by introducing the processes of agent melting and agent splitting that enable individual problem solving agents to continually and autonomously reconfigure and adapt themselves to the particular problem to be solved. The author provides a sound theoretical foundation of collaborative problem solving itself and introduces various new design concepts and techniques to improve its quality and efficiency, such as the multi-phase agreement finding protocol for external problem solving, the composable belief-desire-intention agent architecture, and the distribution-aware constraint specification architecture for internal problem solving. The practical relevance and applicability of the concepts and techniques provided are demonstrated by using medical appointment scheduling as a case study.

This book presents a subselection of papers presented at the ECAI 2000 Workshop on Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems together with additional papers from well-known researchers in the field. The 13 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the present book. Besides two introductory survey papers, the book offers topical sections on architectures and frameworks, enhanced reactivity, and controlled social deliberation.

A key element in Christian Jankowski's (*1968) practice of art involves feeding interventions peppered with humour into media contexts and closed systems. The paths of transmission and moments of disruption materialised in the exhibition Sender and Receiver at Fluentum, which featured a selection of new and previously rarely seen works. The show has been conceptually extended via the eponymous catalogue: Jankowski’s art from the past two decades has been documented in extensive photo series and is accompanied by a variety of texts that examine the content in depth. Of particular interest: a piece on the current coronavirus pandemic. In it, the artist gives so-called essential workers a temporary platform on select television formats in order to publicly share their personal experiences and impressions in a time when living conditions have been altered by the pandemic. The result is a complex stratum of unconventional narratives layered on top of television’s usual working order. Text in English and German.