This paper describes the design of and experimentation with the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language KQML, a new language and protocol for exchanging information and knowledge. This work is part of a larger e ort, the ARPA Knowledge Sharing E ort which is aimed at developing techniques and methodology for building large-scale knowledge bases which are sharable and reusable. KQML is both a message format and a message-handling protocol to support run-time knowledge sharing among agents. KQML focuses on an extensible set of performatives, which de nes the permissible speech acts" agents may use and comprise a substrate on which to develop higher-level models of interagent i n teraction such as contract nets and negotiation. In addition, KQML provides a basic architecture for knowledge sharing through a special class of agent called communication facilitators which coordinate the interactions of other agents The ideas which underlie the evolving design of KQML are currently being explored through experimental prototype systems which are being used to support several testbeds in such areas as concurrent engineering, intelligent design and intelligent planning and scheduling.

This document describes COBRA-ONT an ontology for supporting pervasive context-aware systems. COBRA-ONT, expressed in the Web Ontology Language OWL, is a collection of ontologies for describing places, agents, events and their associated properties in an intelligent meeting room domain. This ontology is developed as a part of the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA), a broker-centric agent architecture that provides knowledge sharing, context reasoning, and privacy protection supports for pervasive context-aware systems. We also describe an inference engine for reasoning with information expressed using the COBRA-ONT ontology and the ongoing research in using the DAML-Time ontology for context reasoning.

In this paper we describe a policy language designed for pervasive computing applications that is based on deontic

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Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter's social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.