Une préoccupation essentielle traverse cette thèse: l'indifférence systémique de la Loi internationale sur la propriété intellectuelle a l'égard des savoirs traditionnels autochtones. De manière générale, un écart semble d'ailleurs croissant entre l'importance des accords internationaux sur les questions d'intérêt commercial…

The appearance and continuous growth of virtual communities on the web imposes the challenge of coping with the large amount of information and knowledge these communities produce. The Semantic Web with its set of standards and technologies provides the basic…

Short survey carried out at the beginning of the course in order to elicit information about the students' background, future prospects and knowledge of ICT.

In a multi-agent system, a group of individ- uals interact in a social context in order to boost their capabilities and enhance global per- formance. Each individual's action repertoire may be reduced, but it's social capability allows it to interact…

The Semantic Web attempts to reach a state in the future where everything on the Web will no longer be only machine-readable, but also machine-understandable. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified…

Collaborative systems are becoming a widely used tool particularly among professional communities and research groups. They provide a suitable context for distributed people working on the same subject to concentrate their work in a shared place to which everyone has…

The knowledge economy requires a different contribution from human capital (i.e. knowledge workers). Knowledge workers are challenge seekers, have high enthusiasm for learning and prefer freedom and flexibility, so it would be wise to suggest that knowledge management should consider…

In this work we analyze the problem of knowledge representation in a collaborative multi-agent system where agents can obtain new information from others through communication. Namely, we analyze several approaches of belief revision in multi-agent systems. We will describe different…

In this work we present a reactive autonomous robot navigation system based only on omnidirectional vision. It does not rely on any prior knowledge about the environment apart from assuming a structured one, like indoor corridors or outdoor avenues. The…

A knowledge of the shape of the cornea is of major importance for the planning and monitoring of surgery, and for the correct diagnosis of corneal diseases. Many authors have studied the geometry of the second corneal surface in the…