Affiliations: UNC-Charlotte, Computer Science Dept., Charlotte, NC 28223, USA | Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computer Science,
Ordona 21, 01-237 Warsaw, Poland
Abstract: In papers [4,5], query answering system based on distributed
knowledge mining was introduced and investigated. In paper by Ras and
Wieczorkowska [3], the notion of an action rule was introduced and for its
application domain e-business was taken. In this paper, we generalize the
notion of action rules in a similar way to handling global queries in [4,5].
Mainly, when values of attributes for a given customer, used in action rules,
can not be easily changed by business user, definitions of these attributes are
extracted from other sites of a distributed knowledge system. To be more
precise, attributes at every site of a distributed knowledge system are divided
into two sets: stable and flexible. Values of flexible attributes, for a given
consumer, sometime can be changed and this change can be influenced and
controlled by a business user. However, some of these changes (for instance to
the attribute ``profit'') can not be done directly to a chosen attribute. In
this case, definitions of such an attribute in terms of other attributes have
to be learned. These new definitions are used to construct action rules showing
what changes in values of flexible attributes, for a given consumer, are needed
in order to re-classify this consumer the way business user wants. But,
business user may be either unable or unwilling to proceed with actions leading
to such changes. In all such cases we may search for definitions of these
flexible attributes looking at either local or remote sites for help.
Keywords: knowledge discovery, distributed information systems, e-commerce
