CONCURRENT, ASYNCHRONOUS SEARCH FOR THE AVAILABILITY OF KNOWLEDGE

We describe how a common conceptual model of the application domain ca n be used to support a cooperative and concurrent search among loosely coupled knowledge sources distributed over a network with unknown top ology. The introduction of a conceptual level, shared among all the kn owledge sources in the net, allows us to obtain independence from the logical data organization of each node, not only from the physical, as is the case in distributed database management systems (DDBMS). The n avigation process is based on the conceptual model and has been design ed and developed by means of a set of cooperative agents, with specifi c knowledge and abilities, that reason about the local data and exchan ge information to ensure both the communication through the net and th e information processing at each net node. In order to ensure the comp rehension of the architecture, we include a worked-out example in the domain of pharmacology where such a model and its associated domain-sp ecific language have been realized.