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Rather than seeking to automate the tasks performed by humans, the trend in modern AI research and application development is towards providing support to human agents in the workplace. The impetus for this lies in an acknowledgement of the differing capabilities of humans and computers, and its aim is to engineer environments where these capabilities will complement each other to greatest effect. Another influence is the dramatic shift in work practices in recent years with the rise of the internet and the WWW (and with the Semantic Web on the horizon), ensuring that knowledge management has become central to the philosophy of the modern organisation.