UNDERSTANDER Business Intelligence Seeker — User agent

Abstract

UNDERSTANDER is an exploratory R&D project investigating Business Intelligence (BI) as a knowledge-gathering tool for supporting innovation processes in specific industrial domains. We develop a knowledge-based model that is grounded on the following three concepts: (i) Business Intelligence Model (BIM) developed by a Canadian project for BI technologies, (ii) taxonomy of Competitive Intelligence (CI) developed by CI practitioners, and (iii) Conceptual Dependency (CD) theory dealing with verb-oriented organization of knowledge. We also investigate whether knowledge-based models can be made adequate for the problem of gathering BI from web resources. Such a knowledge model can be used to “prime” a software agent and the agent can then search autonomously for relevant information on the Web. To express the interaction between agents, we consider “mechanism design”, which is a framework for designing interaction between self-interested agents to achieve specific outcomes. A BI Seeker is a multi-agent application developed in WADE. (Workflows and Agents Development Environment). WADE is an extension of JADE, a popular Open Source framework that brings workflow mechanisms to agents. We present the design of the BI Seeker as an application in the field of Industrial Internet.