Co-Operative And Distributed Configuration

Configuration problem solving is a topic that drove a lot of interest within the AI community. The World Wide Web has appeared as the vehicle to share information and facilitate businesses like the provision of simple configuration capabilities to users. Ontologies have gained acceptance within the research community as the way to make applications interoperable and drive the next intelligent generation of the World Wide Web known as the Semantic Web that many consider as a future enabler of future advance forms of collaborative e-business. It is just this consideration what has motivated the OBELIX consortium to do research on multi-component product configuration, since collaborative design scenarios over the (Semantic) Web will become a future reality, but have not been researched in depth yet. This paper describes the efforts done and the results obtained in that direction.