Kuldar Taveter

Professor, Head of the Software Engineering Chair
Department of Informatics
Faculty of Information Technology
Laboratory of Agent-Oriented Modelling
Tallinn University of Technology
Estonia, EU

How to contact me?

Born on 27 March 1965 in Tallinn, Estonia

Where is Estonia (a question that was frequently asked when I lived in Australia)?

Estonia is a small country in Northern Europe next to Finland, Sweden, Latvia and Russia. Estonia has 1.4 million inhabitants. Its capital is Tallinn. Estonia now forms a part of the European Union, as well as of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Estonian language belongs to the Fenno-Ugric language group. It is related to Finnish and Hungarian but not to Russian or any other Slavic or Indo-European language.

Research interests:

Agent-oriented analysis and modelling of problem domains and design of distributed (agent-based) information systems based on it, business process automation, business rules, ontologies, Web Services, virtual enterprises, workflow, electronic commerce, information retrieval using agents and ontologies.

A new book by MIT Press:

Leon Sterling and Kuldar Taveter. The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: MIT Press. Published in August 2009. Check the book homepage.

Language skills (basic, intermediate, or high level):

Education:

Professional history:

Doctoral (Ph.D.) thesis:

Taveter, K. A multi-perspective methodology for agent-oriented business modelling and simulation. PhD thesis, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, 2004 (ISBN 9985-59-439-8).

Submitted and accepted refereed publications:

1. Piho, G.; Roost, M.; Perkins, D.; Tepandi, J.; Taveter, K. (2010). Towards archetypes-based software development. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Computer, Information, and Systems Sciences, and Engineering (CISSE 2009), December 4-12, 2009 (virtual conference). Springer, 2010 (forthcoming).

Refereed publications (in reverse chronological order):

1. Sterling, L.; Taveter, K. (2009). Design of an environment for agent-based simulation of air-to-air business processes. In: Proceedings of the 7th European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2009), Ayia Napa, Cyprus, December 17-18, 2009.

2. Sterling, L. & Taveter, K. (2009). The art of agent-oriented modeling. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press.

3. Sterling, L. & Taveter, K. (2009). A logic programming perspective on rules. In A. Giurca, D. Gašević, & K. Taveter (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Emerging Rule-Based Languages and Technologies: Open Solutions and Approaches. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

4. Sterling, L. & Taveter, K. (2009). Event-based optimization of air-to-air business processes. In N. Stojanovic, A. Abecker, O. Etzion, & A. Paschke (Eds.), Proceedings of the Intelligent Event Processing – AAAI Spring Symposium 2009. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press

5. Taveter, K., Sterling, L. Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. In: Mehdi Khosrow-Pour (ed.), Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 2nd Edition (see the 1st Edition). IGI Global, 2008, the article is also availabe at Info-Sci Online of IGI Global.

6. Taveter, K., Sterling, L. An Expressway from Agent-Oriented Models to Prototype Systems. In: M. Luck, L. Padgham (eds.), Agent Oriented Software Engineering VIII, Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE 2007), held in conjunction with the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2007), May 14-18, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4951, Springer, 2008, pp. 149-166.

7. Lu, B., Sterling, L., Taveter, K. Supporting Evolving Multi-Agent Systems with a System Evolution Directory. Proceedings of the 19th Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2008), Perth, Western Australia, March 26-28, 2008. IEEE Computer Society Press.

8. Luo, Y., Sterling, L., Taveter, K. Modeling a Smart Music Player with a Hybrid Agent-Oriented Methodology. In: Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, October 15-19, 2007, Delhi, India. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2007.

9. Taveter, K. A Technique and Markup Language for Business Process Automation. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies, and Rules for The Enterprise (VORTE 2006), to be held in conjunction with the Tenth IEEE International EDOC (The Enterprise Computing) Conference, 16-20 October 2006, Hong Kong. IEEE Computer Society Press (electronic edition), 2006.

10. Taveter, K., Wagner, G. Agent-Oriented Modelling and Simulation of Distributed Manufacturing. In: Rennard, J.-P. (ed.), Handbook of Research on Nature Inspired Computing for Economy and Management. Idea Group Publishing, 2006.

11. Taveter, K. Application of RAP/AOR to the Modelling and Simulation of a Ceramic Factory. In: Rennard, J.-P. (ed.), Handbook of Research on Nature Inspired Computing for Economy and Management. Idea Group Publishing, 2006.

12. Sterling, L., Taveter, K. and The Daedalus Team. Building Agent-Based Appliances with Complementary Methodologies. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering 2006 (JCKBSE'06), August 28-31, 2006, Tallinn, Estonia. IOS Press, 2006.

13. Lister, K., Sterling, L., Taveter, K. Reconciling Ontological Differences by Assistant Agents. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-06), Future University, Hakodate, Japan, May 8-12, 2006. ACM Press, 2006, pp. 943-945. Enjoy the poster, as well!

14. Taveter, K. Business Process Automation with Representing and Reasoning on Trust. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International IEEE Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN’05). 10 - 12 August 2005, Perth, Western Australia. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2005.

15. Taveter, K. CONE: Improving Human-Computer Interaction by Integrated Ontological Models. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. 22 - 27 July 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

16. Taveter, K., Wagner, G. Towards Radical Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Processes Based on AOR Modelling. In: Henderson-Sellers, B., Giorgini, P. (eds.), Agent-Oriented Methodologies. Idea Group Publishing, 2005.

17. Wagner, G., Taveter, K. Towards Radical Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Processes Based on AOR Modeling. In: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'04). September 20 - 24, 2004, Beijing, China. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2004, pp. 509-512.

18. Taveter, K. From Business Process Modelling to Business Process Automation. In: Cordeiro, J., Filipe, J. (eds.), Computer Supported Activity Coordination - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computer Supported Activity Coordination (CSAC 2004). In conjunction with ICEIS 2004, Porto, Portugal, April 2004. INSTICC PRESS, 2004, pp. 198 - 210.

19. Taveter, K, Hääl, R. Agent-Oriented Modelling and Simulation of a Ceramic Factory. In: Juuso, E., Yliniemi, L. (eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Conference of Simulation and Modelling (SIMS 2002). 26 - 27 September 2002, Oulu, Finland. Finnish Society of Automation and Scandinavian Simulation Society, 2002, pp. 102 - 110.

20. Taveter, K., Wagner, G. A Multi-perspective Methodology for Modelling Inter-enterprise Business Processes. In: Arisawa, H., Kambayashi, Y., Kumar, V., Mayr, H.C., Hunt, I. (eds), Conceptual Modelling for New Information Systems Technologies, ER 2001 Workshops HUMACS, DASWIS, ECOMO, and DAMA. Yokohama, Japan, November 27 - 30, 2001. Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2465, Springer, 2002, pp. 403 - 416.

21. Raffel, W. U., Taveter, K. & Wagner, G. R. (2001). Agent-oriented modeling of business rules and business processes – the case of automatically guided transport systems. In: Proceedings of “Verbundtagung Verteilte Informationssysteme auf der Grundlage von Objekten, Komponenten und Agenten”(verIS2001). October 2001, Bamberg, Germany (pp. 72-81).

22. Oja, M., Tamm, B., Taveter, K. Agent-based software design. In: Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Engineering, Vol. 50, No. 1, March 2001, pp. 5-21.

23. Taveter, K., Wagner, G. Agent-Oriented Enterprise Modelling Based on Business Rules. In:  Kunii, H. S., Jajodia, S., Sølvberg, A. (eds.), Conceptual Modelling - ER 2001, 20th International Conference on Conceptual Modelling. Yokohama, Japan, November 27 - 30, 2001. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2224, Springer, 2001, pp. 527-540.

24. Taveter, K., Wagner, G. Agent-Oriented Business Rules: Deontic Assignments. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Open Enterprise Solutions: Systems, Experiences, and Organizations (OES-SEO 2001). 14 - 15 September 2001, Rome, Italy.

25. Taveter, K. From Descriptive to Prescriptive Models of Agent-Oriented Information Systems. In: Wagner, G., Karlapalem, K., Lesperance, Y., Yu. E. (eds.), Agent-Oriented Information Systems 2001. Proceedings of the Third International Bi-Conference Workshop AOIS-2001. 28 May 2001, Montreal, Canada and 4 June 2001, Interlaken, Switzerland. iCue Publishing, Berlin, 2001, pp. 33 - 44.

26. Lehtola, A, Tenni, J., Taveter, K., Käpylä, T., Silvonen, P., Jaaranen, K. Engineering Multilingual Internet Commerce. In: Stephanidis, C. (ed), Universal Access in HCI, Vol. 3 of the Proceedings of HCI International 2001. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, New Jersey, pp. 501 - 505.

27. Taveter, K. The use of deontic notions in agent-oriented business information systems. In: Hyötyniemi, H. (ed.), Proceedings of the 9th Finnish Artificial Intelligence Conference (STeP 2000). Espoo, Finland, 28 - 31 August 2000. Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society (FAIS), 2000, pp. 77 - 83.

28. Taveter, K., Wagner, G. Combining AOR Diagrams and Ross Business Rules' Diagrams for Enterprise Modelling. In: Lesperance, Y., Wagner, G., Yu. E. (eds.), Agent-Oriented Information Systems 2000. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS-2000). Stockholm, Sweden, 5 - 6 June and Austin, Texas, 30 July 2000. iCue Bublishing, Berlin, 2000, pp. 113 - 130.

29. Taveter, K., Tamm, B. A New Approach to the Modelling, Design and Implementation of Business Information Systems. In: Barzdins, J., Caplinskas, A. (eds.), Databases and Information Systems, 4th International Baltic Workshop, Baltic DB&IS, Selected Papers. Vilnius, Lithuania, 1 - 5 May 2000. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2000, pp. 176 - 192.

30. Taveter, K., Lehtola, A. et al. 1999. Ontology-Based Query Translation for Legislative Information Retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 5th ERCIM Workshop On User Interfaces for All. November 28 - December 1, 1999, Dagstuhl, Germany.

31. Taveter, K. Business Rules' Approach to the Modelling, Design and Implementation of Agent-Oriented Information Systems. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS'99). Seattle, USA, 1 May 1999 and Heidelberg, Germany, 14 - 15 June 1999. Seattle, Heidelberg, 1999, pp. 59 - 75.

32. Taveter, K. Java Agents that Realize Business Rules. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the Practical Applications of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM'99). London, GB, 19 - 21 April 1999. Practical Application Company Ltd, Blackpool, UK, 1999, pp. 471 - 472.

33. Taveter, K. Intelligent Information Retrieval Based on Interconnected Concepts and Classes of Retrieval Domains. In: Proceedings of the Eighth DELOS Workshop on User Interface in Digital Libraries. Stockholm, Sweden, October 21 - 23, 1998. ERCIM Workshop Proceedings, No. 99-W001.

34. Taveter, K. The Use of Viewpoints and Bridges for Overcoming Conceptual Differences Between Information Sources. In: Proceedings of the 8th Finnish Artificial Intelligence Conference (STeP'98). Jyväskylä, Finland, September 7 - 9, Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society (FAIS), 2000, pp. 51-54.

35. Taveter, K. From Object-Oriented Programming Towards Agent-Oriented Programming. In: Grahne, G. (ed.), Proceeedings of the Sixth Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI'97). Helsinki, Finland, August 18 - 20. IOS Press, 1997, p. 288.

36. Tamm, B., Taveter, K. A List-based Virtual Machine for COBOL. Software - Practice and Experience, Vol. 26 (12) (December 1996).

Reports:

1. Sterling, L. & Taveter, K. (2009). Event-based optimization of air-to-air business processes. In B. Long & A. MacDonald (Eds.). An industry experience report at the Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2009), Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 14-17 April 2009.

2. Sterling, L., Taveter, K. and the Daedalus Team. Experience from Building Industry Strength Agent-Based Appliances. An industry experience report at the Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2006), Sydney, Australia, April 18-21, 2006.

3. Antoniou, G., Berndtsson, M., Spreeuwenberg, S., Taveter, K., Wagner, G. A First-Version Visual Rule Language. Reasoning on the Web with Rules and Semantics (REWERSE, IST-2004-506779), Project Deliverable I1-D1.

4. Lucenius, J., Antikainen, H., Taveter, K. XML-EDI: New Approaches in EDI. Research Report TTE3-2001-8. VTT Information Technology, 2004.

5. Gómez-Pérez, A., Corcho García, O., Fernández López, M., Lehtola, A., Taveter, K., Sorva, J., Käpylä, T., Tourmani, F., Soualmia, L., Barboux, C., Castro, E., Sallantin, J., Arbant, G., Bonnaric, A. Requirements, Choice of a Knowledge Representation and Tools. Multilingual Knowledge Based European Electronic Marketplace (MKBEEM, IST-1999-10589), Project Deliverable D3.1 - V2.0. Available at http://www.mkbeem.com

6. Kouroupis, Y., Stavroulas, Y., Tsiara, K., Varvarigou, T., Lehtola, A., Taveter, K., Villagrá, V. A., de Vergara, J. E. L., Duhem, C. Technology Review and Selection: Public Release. Multilingual Knowledge Based European Electronic Marketplace (MKBEEM, IST-1999-10589), Project Deliverable D5.1 - Public Release. Available at http://www.mkbeem.com

7. Taveter, K. From Object-Oriented Programming Towards Agent-Oriented Programming. In: Grahne, G. (ed.), Sixth Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SCAI'97): Research Announcements. Helsinki, Finland, August 18 - 20, 1997. University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Report C-1997-49, pp. 87 - 98.

8. Taveter, K. Design and Use of Virtual Machines for Implementing Agent Programming Languages. Databases and Information Systems, Technical Report CS 87/96, Proceedings of the Second International Baltic Workshop. Tallinn, Estonia, June 12 - 14, 1996.

Other publications:

1. Taveter, K. Agile Engineering of B2B Automation Systems. ERCIM News No. 58 (July 2004).

2. Taveter, K. SARI - A System for Semantical Information Retrieval. ERCIM News No. 35 (October 1998).

Editing books and journal special issues:

1. Adrian Giurca, Dragan Gašević, Kuldar Taveter (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Emerging Rule-Based Languages and Technologies: Open Solutions and Approaches. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

2. Dragan Gašević, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Kuldar Taveter, Gerd Wagner (Eds.), Information Systems - Special Issue on “Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for Enterprise and Business Process Modeling and Management”. Elsevier, 2010 (forthcoming).

Chairing conference tracks and workshops:

I have organized or participated in organizing the following conference tracks and workshops:

1. The Student Track Chair at the Inaugural IEEE International Digital EcoSystems Technologies Conference (IEEE-DEST 2007), Business Ecosystems for Small and Medium Enterprises, Cairns, Australia, 21-23 February 2007.

2. The Industry Track Chair at the 18th Australian Conference on Software Engineering (ASWEC 2007), Melbourne, Australia, 10-13 April, 2007.

3. An organizer and co-chair of the Third International Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies, and Rules for The Enterprise (VORTE 2007).

Program committees:

I have belonged or belong to the program committees of the following conferences and workshops:

1. The 9th Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering (JCKBSE´10), August 25-27, 2010, Kaunas, Lithuania.

2. The Ninth Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems (DB&IS 2010), July 5-7, 2010, Riga, Latvia.

3. The Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009), Budapest, Hungary, May 10-15, 2009.

4. The 20th Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2009), Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 14-17 April 2009.

5. The 3rd International Conference on Adaptive Business Information Systems (ABIS 2009), Leipzig, Germany, 23-25 March 2009.

6. International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 09), 19-21 January, 2009, Porto, Portugal.

7. The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2008), in conjunction with the 11th International Business Rules Forum, Orlando, Florida, USA, October 30-31, 2008.

8. The 2nd East European Workshop on Rule-Based Applications (RuleApps’2008), in conjunction with the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2008), University of Patras, Patras, Greece, July 21-22, 2008.

9. The 12th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS'2008), September 5-9, 2008, Pori, Finland.

10. The 8th International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems (DB&IS'2008), June 2-5, 2008, Tallinn, Estonia.

11. The 19th Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2008), Perth, Western Australia, 26 - 28 March 2008.

12. The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2007), in conjunction with the 10th International Business Rules Forum, Orlando, Florida, USA, October 25-26, 2007.

13. The First East European Workshop on Rule Based Applications (RuleApps'2007), in conjunction with the the 9th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNACS'2007), September 26-29, 2007, Timisoara, Romania.

14. The Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies, and Rules for The Enterprise (VORTE 2006), in conjunction with the Tenth IEEE International EDOC (The Enterprise Computing) Conference, 16-20 October 2006, Hong Kong.

15. Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering 2006 (JCKBSE'06), August 28-31, 2006, Tallinn, Estonia (see also JCKBSE 2004).

16. The Eighth International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS-2006), May 9, 2006, in conjunction with the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-06), Future University, Hakodate, Japan, May 8-12, 2006.

17. The Seventh International Bi-Conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS-2005), in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Conceptual Modelling (ER 2005), October 24-28, 2005, Klagenfurt, Austria.

18. The 9th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS'2005), September 12-15, 2005, Tallinn, Estonia.

19. The IADIS Virtual Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (MCCSIS 2005), 11 - 29 April 2005.

In addition, I have acted as a reviewer for the following conferences and journals:

1. The First International Workshop on Agents, Web Services and Ontologies Merging (AWeSOMe'05), October 31, 2005, in conjunction with the OnTheMove Federated Conferences (OTM 2005), Agia Napa, Cyprus, 31 Oct - 4 Nov 2005.

2. The 29th Australasian Computer Science Conference-2006 (ACSC2006), the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, January 16-19, 2006.

3. The Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2006), Sydney, Australia, April 18-21, 2006.

4. The Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-06), Future University, Hakodate, Japan, May 8-12, 2006.

5. The 4th International IEEE Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN’06), 16-18 August 2006, Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel, Singapore.

6. International Journal of Web Services Research, Special Issue on Web Service Discovery and Composition Systems. October 2006, Idea Group Publishing.

7. The journal: Software and Systems Modeling, Springer.

8. The journal: Data and Knowledge Engineering, Elsevier.

9. The journal: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Colleagues and research partners:

• Prof Leon Sterling (Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Melbourne) - agent-oriented modelling and software engineering.

• Lic. Sc. (Tech.) Aarno Lehtola - electronic commerce and computational linguistics.

Other interests:

I am interested in (technological) innovation and promoting it in Estonia. Some of my thoughts about this topic are available here.

Personal information:

I am a Christian (Lutheran by background), and believe in salvation through only Jesus Christ. In Estonia I and my wife are graduate members of the Estonian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (in Estonian), forming a part of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. In Finland we belonged to the International Evangelical Church and in Australia to St John's Anglican Church at West Brunswick, Melbourne. To learn more about its pastor (priest) Reverend Howard Langmead, see here and here. After returning to Estonia, we have found our spiritual home at the International Baptist Church of Tallinn, which is a young and growing English-speaking congregation with a right sense of Christian fellowship.

I am married to Siiri and we have two daughters: Eliise Marie and Sanne Sigrid. Here I am with my family in Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia near Melbourne: