We discuss main formalisations of information and knowledge available in literature. Knowledge is considered as a meaning of data for an actor who can understand and use it. The actor can be a computer, a robot, a human being or even a virus. We make an assumption that the usage of knowledge depends on material data carrier only as much as the latter allows one to perform operations and restricts knowledge processing through capacity and time. This permits one to consider knowledge abstractly. Knowledge handling requires some tools that are called knowledge systems. These systems have different forms and they can be connected in various ways as it follows from the analysed publications. A metrics of knowledge is discussed that reflects the capability of solving problems.

We analyze an approach to software development where object-oriented and compositional software specifications are written in separate languages and are only loosely connected. It supports compositional design of software in a domain-specific language and automatic model-driven construction of code from classes written in Java. We justify our approach by giving examples of development of large simulation programs and services on large models. We present also an example of using our method in general purpose software development - this is bootstrapping the essential part of a software tool CoCoViLa, i.e. synthesizing CoCoViLa in CoCoViLa itself.

In this paper we define a concept of service model, and introduce hierarchical service models suitable for large service parks. We describe a method for handling higher-order workflows that we use for automatic composition of services. We give a description of a specification language suitable for representing hierarchical service models. We introduce two kinds of ontologies: service ontologies and the user ontologies, and demonstrate their usage in our experiments on Estonian e-government information system.

A scenario of development of intelligent computers and cyber space in coming decades is presented under the assumptions that computing will change from data processing to knowledge processing, and the development of intelligence of computers will follow the same path as the increase of performance of hardware. For this purpose, knowledge, thinking, reflection and consciousness are defined as approximations of respective concepts of psychology. These concepts are used in an analysis of evolution of the cyber space.

Experiments with large service models of a federated governmental information system are described. Large syntactic Web service models are being used for automatic composition of services in an e-government information system. A visual tool developed in software environment CoCoViLa has been used for handling syntactic service models and synthesis of compound services. For a given specification and a goal, the tool synthesizes a program that generates a service description in OWLS and BPEL.

In this paper we propose a compositional logical semantics for business process languages to be used in automatic Web service composition. We introduce a concept of higher order work flow (HOWF) and use it for expressing control of business process. A precise semantics of HOWF enables us both to dynamically generate HOWF for automatic composition of services and to reason about the reachability of goals in process models when HOWF are described manually. Our semantics is general enough to cover different process languages; however, we mainly show its applicability in the context of OWLS and BPEL.

A way of combining object-oriented and structural paradigms of software composition is demonstrated in a tool for generative programming. Metaclasses are introduced that are components with specifications called metainterfaces. Automatic code generation is used that is based on structural synthesis of programs. This guarantees that problems of handling data dependencies, order of application of components, usage of higher-order control structures etc are handled automatically. Specifications can be written either in a specification language or given visually on an architectural level. The tool is Java-based and portable.

Strategies of the structural synthesis of programs (SSP) of a deductive program synthesis method which is suited for compositional programming in large and is in practical use in a number of programming environments are outlined. SSP is based on a decidable logical calculus where complexity of the proof search is still PSPACE. This requires paying special attention to efficiency of search. Besides the general case of SSP, the authors present synthesis with independent subtasks, synthesis of iterations on regular data structures in terms of SSP and a number of heuristics used for speeding up the search.