Conceptual driven search among distributed knowledge sources

We describe how a common conceptual model of the application domain can be used to support a cooperative and concurrent search among loosely coupled knowledge sources (KSs) distributed over a network with unknown topology. The introduction of a conceptual level, shared among all the KSs in the net, allows one to obtain independence from the logical data organization of each node, not only from the physical as it is the case in DDBMS. The navigation process is based on the conceptual model and has been designed by means of a set of cooperative agents, with specific knowledge and abilities, that reason about the local data and exchange information to ensure both communication through the net and information processing at each net node.<>