This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Rules, RuleML 2011 - Europe, held in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2011 - collocated with the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2011. It is the first of two RuleML events that take place in 2011. The second RuleML Symposium - RuleML 2011 - America - will be held in Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, in November 2011. The 18 revised full papers, 8 revised short papers and 3 invited track papers presented together with the abstracts of 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: rule-based distributed/multi-agent systems; rules, agents and norms; rule-based event processing and reaction rules; fuzzy rules and uncertainty; rules and the semantic Web; rule learning and extraction; rules and reasoning; and rule-based applications.

This book proposes a consistent methodology for building intelligent systems. It puts forward several formal models for designing and implementing rules-based systems, and presents illustrative case studies of their applications. These include software engineering, business process systems, Semantic Web, and context-aware systems on mobile devices. Rules offer an intuitive yet powerful method for representing human knowledge, and intelligent systems based on rules have many important applications. However, their practical development requires proper techniques and models - a gap that this book effectively addresses.

With the rapid expansion of the Internet over the last 20 years, event-based distributed systems are playing an increasingly important role in a broad range of application domains, including enterprise management, environmental monitoring, information dissemination, finance, pervasive systems, autonomic computing, collaborative working and learning, and geo-spatial systems. Many different architectures, languages and technologies are being used for implementing event-based distributed systems, and much of the development has been undertaken independently by different communities. However, a common factor is an ever-increasing complexity. Users and developers expect that such systems are able not only to handle large volumes of simple events but also to detect complex patterns of events that may be spatially distributed and may span significant periods of time. Intelligent and logic-based approaches provide sound foundations for addressing many of the research challenges faced and this book covers a broad range of recent advances, contributed by leading experts in the field. It presents a comprehensive view of reasoning in event-based distributed systems, bringing together reviews of the state-of-the art, new research contributions, and an extensive set of references. It will serve as a valuable resource for students, faculty and researchers as well as industry practitioners responsible for new systems development.

This volume contains some carefully selected papers presented at the 8th International Conference on Knowledge, Information and Creativity Support Systems KICCS’2013, which was held in Kraków and Wieliczka, Poland in November 2013. In most cases the papers are extended versions with newer results added, representing virtually all topics covered by the conference. The KICCS’2013 focus theme, “Looking into the Future of Creativity and Decision Support Systems”, clearly indicates that the growing complexity calls for some deeper and insightful discussions about the future but, obviously, complemented with an exposition of modern present developments that have proven their power and usefulness. Following this theme, the list of topics presented in this volume include some future-oriented fields of research, such as anticipatory networks and systems, foresight support systems, relevant newly-emerging applications, exemplified by autonomous creative systems. Special attention was also given to cognitive and collaborative aspects of creativity.

Pattern-Directed Inference Systems provides a description of the design and implementation of pattern-directed inference systems (PDIS) for various applications. The book also addresses the theoretical significance of PDIS for artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. The book is divided into eight sections. The introduction provides a brief overview of pattern-directed inference systems, including a historical perspective, a review of basic concepts, and a survey of work in this area. Subsequent chapters address topics on architecture and design, methods for accessing and controlling rule based systems, methods for obtaining adaptive behavior via rule-based systems and cognitive modeling. Constructing models of human information processing, natural language understanding and multilevel systems and complexity are described as well. The last section discusses the earlier chapters in the book and provides a unifying set of principles for the PDIS formalism. Computer scientists, psychologists, engineers, and researchers in artificial intelligence will find the book very informative.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Rules, RuleML 2011 - Europe, held in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2011 - collocated with the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2011. It is the first of two RuleML events that take place in 2011. The second RuleML Symposium - RuleML 2011 - America - will be held in Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, in November 2011. The 18 revised full papers, 8 revised short papers and 3 invited track papers presented together with the abstracts of 2 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: rule-based distributed/multi-agent systems; rules, agents and norms; rule-based event processing and reaction rules; fuzzy rules and uncertainty; rules and the semantic Web; rule learning and extraction; rules and reasoning; and rule-based applications.

This book reports on the development and validation of a generic defeasible logic programming framework for carrying out argumentative reasoning in Semantic Web applications (GF@SWA). The proposed methodology is unique in providing a solution for representing incomplete and/or contradictory information coming from different sources, and reasoning with it. GF@SWA is able to represent this type of information, perform argumentation-driven hybrid reasoning to resolve conflicts, and generate graphical representations of the integrated information, thus assisting decision makers in decision making processes. GF@SWA represents the first argumentative reasoning engine for carrying out automated reasoning in the Semantic Web context and is expected to have a significant impact on future business applications. The book provides the readers with a detailed and clear exposition of different argumentation-based reasoning techniques, and of their importance and use in Semantic Web applications. It addresses both academics and professionals, and will be of primary interest to researchers, students and practitioners in the area of Web-based intelligent decision support systems and their application in various domains.