The European Commission sponsored IBROW project is developing an intelligent broker, which will make it possible to configure a knowledge-based system from software components distributed over the World-Wide-Web.  In order to achievethis goal, the IBROW broker will perform specialised search over the World-Wide-Web to analyse the contents of existing libraries and identify the components relevant to an application.  The scenario we envisage is the following: a user logs on to the IBROW server on the World-Wide-Web and enters the specification of the knowledge-intensive problem he or she wants to solve.  For instance, this could be an engineering design problem.  The broker will then examine the available libraries of software components and configure a suitable problem solver for the problem in question.  The IBROW software broker relies on shared ontologies to support such component reuse.

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