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Research Groups

Internet Logic

The group's research focus is on: Semantic Web techniques, business rules, (Policy) RuleML, procurement systems and reasoning systems for supporting business processes.

Current Projects
	EstablishIT
	MarketPlace NB
	Policy RuleML
	PolicyValidator: Interactive creation of e-business policies in logic
	RACOFI Composer™
	Semantic Web Laboratory

The objectives of the newly formed Internet Logic group fall into two main areas: rules for business logic and the electronic marketplace. We seek to develop and apply logic tools to express and enforce the intentions of business partners as they delegate economic activity to electronic agents. This requires the precise semantics of logic languages for expressing people's intentions before they can trust and delegate tasks to their e-agents. Within this, we see four main avenues: (1) to promote RuleML as a knowledge representation and reasoning language across the web, (2) to allow business partners to specify what transactions they intend to allow and under what conditions, (3) to guide prospective partners through interactions that allow them to establish credentials and meet eligibility criteria set by other partners, and (4) to assist users to create logical descriptions of policies, interactively ensuring they meet the users' intentions. Within these four avenues with long-term goals, we have established short-term goals of delivering prototypes.

We also (5) investigate and intend to build electronic marketplaces that provide rich protocols for expressing business intentions to potential partners, specifically to share probabilistic and temporal information about offers: what they are likely to be and when the exact offers will be exchanged.

The objectives above offer an end-to-end solution to assist people to create logic policies, to assess a given situation for compliance with the policy, and to assist people in interactively applying the policy to their situation.

The Internet Logic group's research has led to:

A successful offering in fall 2002 of a graduate course at the University of New Brunswick in the Faculty of Computer Science, CS6999 Semantic Web Techniques.
Editorship of a special issue of Computational Intelligence (Blackwell Publishing), a leading international journal that promotes and stimulates research in the field of artificial intelligence. Volume 18 Number 4 is entitled Agent Technologies for Electronic Commerce and contains eleven papers selected from twenty-one submissions. Some of the submissions were follow-on work after the Novel Electronic Commerce Applications of Agents workshop, held at the AI 2000, the Canadian conference on artificial intelligence, in Ottawa.
BASeWEB (Business Agents and the Semantic Web), a successful workshop held at AI 2002, the Canadian conference on artificial intelligence in Calgary with 9 papers.
Co-editorship along with Robin Cohen (Waterloo) of the proceedings of AI 2002, the Canadian conference on artificial intelligence in Calgary, published by Springer Verlag in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, number 2338.

The Internet Logic group's research could have the following impacts and benefits.
Electronic B2C and B2B transactions transmit many billion dollars per year of goods, services and electronic money, but the industry is widely recognized as having a great deal of unfulfilled potential. The Internet Logic group makes progress toward providing business systems that (1) aid a business partner to express precisely its criteria that other partners and transactions must meet, and (2) select the transactions that best improve its utility. This proposal is expected to have impact on several research areas, including software engineering of computational logic systems, logics for e-business policies, and protocols for e-negotiation.

The group is working toward creating standards with OASIS and with W3C for rule languages for expressing business policy, and concurrently creating prototypes to support such business applications. We are promoting RuleML as the basis of these languages.

The Internet Logic group's key competencies are:
Logic, Semantic Web, Web Services, Decision Theory, Utility Theory, Inference Engines, Explanation Systems, Privacy Rules, XML, RDF.

Additional Information

Research Contact

Dr. Bruce Spencer
Group Leader
Internet Logic
NRC Institute for Information Technology
46 Dineen Drive
Fredericton, NB E3B 9W4
Telephone: +1 (506) 444-0384
E-mail: Bruce.Spencer@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

Business Contact

Marc-Alain Mallet
Business Development Officer
Business Development Office, New Brunswick
NRC Institute for Information Technology
46 Dineen Drive
Fredericton, NB E3B 9W4
Telephone: +1 (506) 444-0394
Fax: +1 (506) 452-3859
E-mail: Marc-Alain.Mallet@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca