![](bg4.png)
information for each of the participants helps carry
out their tasks more effectively thereby enhancing
the overall enterprise productivity. Considering a
business scenario in which a group consisting of a
purchase manager, an R & D manager, and a finance
manager are meeting to negotiate on the
procurement of items necessary for a research
project requires that the purchase manager is well
prepared to answer the queries from both the R & D
manager and the finance manager. The required
information to help the purchase manager is
obtained both from the internal information sources
and the external information sources. As described
in this paper, both business context and user context
are used to retrieve the most relevant information
from the multiple information sources. Further, as
the meeting progresses and issues get discussed in
depth, the context changes and additional
information needs to be retrieved and provided to
enable the purchase manage to continue to be
effective. To achieve this real-time provisioning of
information, that may also involve real-time analysis
to be performed, combined data and app grids seem
to be very appropriate.
Figure 4: M ulti-Agent Collaboration Scenarios
Implicit multi-agent collaboration
Explicit multi-agent collaboration
Clet1
Nlet1
Goal: To satisfy the customers
0. Obtain the current goal
1. Obtain the relevant info for the next
agenda item
2. Submit a query to EIS to obtain the list of
participants and their issues
3. Obtain the information
4. Obtain the information
5. Request for the possible locations
locations of the participants
6. Obtain the information
7. Request for the necessary documents,
emails, and discussion notes;
8. Obtain the information
1
EG
2
3
Glet1
0
4
Slet1
5
6
Alet1
7
8
Clet1
Nlet1
Slet1
Plet1
1
2
3
Goal: To set up a video conference
1. Interact to obtain agenda of the participants
2. Interact to obtain physical location information of the
pa rticip a nts
3. Interact to obtain the information related to the presence on
the network
4. De term ine (a) availability o f the participants; (b) possible
locations; (c) possible network configurations; and (d) possible
devices for setting up of the video conference
5. Interact with Clet of participant 1 to agree on video
conference parameters
6. Interact with Clet of participant 2 to agree on video
conference parameters
7. Interact with Clet of participant 3 to agree on video
conference parameters
8. Interact with system to set up the video conference on the
agreed parameters
4
Clet1
Clet1
Clet1
5
6
7
System
In this paper, we have discussed the various
aspects of the notion of context in an enterprise and
have described approaches for tracking the various
aspects of the context in order to provide the most
relevant information at the most appropriate time.
We are working on extending a presently under
development system for enterprise related business
scenarios.
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