CFP (extended deadline): Ontologies in Agent Systems at AAMAS'02

I am appending the final call for papers for the Workshop on
Ontologies in Agent Systems at AAMAS 2002.  Note that the submission
deadline has been extended to 28 April.

- Stephen

     --- CALL FOR PAPERS --- CALL FOR PAPERS --- CALL FOR PAPERS ---

                               OAS 2002
       Second International Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems
            
                          to be held at the
          1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents
			& Multiagent Systems
                           Bologna, Italy

                            16 July 2002

                http://autonomousAgents.org/2002/oas/
                            -------------

 Our apologies if you receive this multiple times.

Abstract and Objectives
-----------------------
The OAS 2002 workshop aims to provide for lively discussion on the
issues involved in using ontologies to support interactions between
software agents. Particular topics of interest are: 

 1. Practical experience and considerations in designing 
    agent-based applications using ontology techniques and the 
    infrastructural support required for their effective use. 

 2. Discussion of the dependencies between ontologies, their 
    supporting technologies and other aspects of agent 
    systems such as agent architectures and communication mechanisms. 

 3. Comparison of different ontology representation approaches 
    for use in agent systems. 

Emphasis will be on the discussion of ontologies with respect to
the practical impact they have on agent architecture and application
design. 

The workshop will be held at the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent
Systems 2002 conference taking place in Bologna, Italy from 15 to 19 July,
2002.

Important Dates
---------------
Electronic submission of abstract:        26 April, 2002
(Extended) paper submission deadline:     28 April, 2002
Author notification:                      12 May, 2002
Camera-ready copy deadline:               22 May, 2002
Date of Workshop:                         16 July, 2002

Background 
----------
Over the past few years, researchers and industry have both been
involved in a great drive towards enabling interoperability between
diverse information sources and service-providing software through the
explicit modelling of concepts used in communication.  Examples of
this type of effort include the Semantic Web and (less formally) the
OMG's model driven architecture and XML-based based business standards
such as ebXML.  The objective is to capture explicit
conceptualisations of application domains in the form of schemas,
data-models or ontologies, thereby making it possible for systems and
system designers to share the same semantics for terms used in
interactions.  The problems in creating, maintaining and using such
descriptions are seen by many as critical to future commercial and
non-commercial information networks.

In addition to these ontology efforts there are now a number of
large-scale initiatives to create open environments that support the
interaction of many diverse systems (e.g. Agentcities, Grid computing
and Web Services among others).  Researchers involved in these
initiatives have recognised the need to combine agent and ontology
technology to achieve a useful level of interoperability.

Since the first OAS workshop in 2001 the intersection between agents
and ontologies has become even more important.  There are now many
more projects applying ontology modelling techniques to agent
applications, and industry efforts such as Web Services and ebXML are
beginning to have a significant effect on business system deployment
plans.

Workshop Format
---------------
The workshop will take place over one day with discussion and
presentation split between:

 - Full paper presentations (see "paper submission" below) 
 - Invited presentations
 - Panel discussions  based on short papers and invited panellists 

Topics of Interest
------------------
Topics of interest related to the three workshop objectives (above) 
include but are not limited to:

Area 1: Application and Practical Issues
 - Practical experience in building agent systems using explicit 
   ontologies to support inter-agent communication. 

 - Techniques agents might use to deal with multiple ontology 
   representation languages, incomplete or incorrect ontologies, 
   mapping information from one ontology to another 
   or the evolution of ontologies over time. 

 - Requirements for ontology support in agent applications and agent 
   toolkits including support for access to existing (e.g. Web-based) 
   ontology resources. 

 - Issues surrounding the reuse of existing ontologies by agent
   systems.  In particular, the problems associated with adaptation
   and extension of existing ontologies for specific systems, and
   repositories of ontologies in particular domains (infrastructure,
   tools, access by agent systems and management).

Area 2: Theoretical Issues
 - Metamodelling or other techniques for clarifying the relationship 
   between ontologies and agents' messaging and reasoning systems. 

 - Theoretical foundations for issues in semantic mapping and
   translation to achieve high fidelity communication among agents.
   For example, what are the relationships between ontology modelling
   languages and agent communication mechanisms: what are the
   dependencies between (for example) the semantics of a communication
   language and what can be expressed in the ontology?

Area 3: Evaluation and Comparison
 - Strengths and weaknesses of current ontology representation 
   approaches for use with agents - both specific technologies and 
   generic techniques such as logic-based and object-oriented 
   approaches and those based on Semantic Web models. 

 - The role of standards for ontology representation and communication

 - Classifications identifying which approaches are most appropriate 
   for particular applications or communication requirements. 

Paper Submission
----------------
Since the objective of the workshop is to enable lively discussion
we encourage all participants to submit a paper contribution (as
workshop space will be limited, paper authors will also 
receive priority in workshop registration). Papers may be one of 
three types:

 - Full papers: may be up to eight pages in length and should describe
   original work related to workshop topics.

 - Short papers and position statements: should be no more than two
   pages in length and should describe a problem or research issue
   that you consider to be important (for position statements) or on
   which you are working (for short papers).

Papers may be entirely new work, discussion papers weighing up
different approaches, descriptions of applications or requirements, or
accounts of practical experiences.  Accepted papers will be included
in the proceedings and considered for presentation.

All papers should be formatted following the style of ACM conference
proceedings.  Templates for Word, WordPerfect and LaTeX are available
at: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

Submissions will be electronic only (PostScript or PDF format), via
the workshop Web site (http://autonomousAgents.org/2002/oas/).
 
Publication
-----------
All accepted papers will be available on the day of the workshop in a
set of working notes. 

This workshop is being held in cooperation with the EKAW 2002 Workshop
on Ontologies for Multi-Agent Systems to be held on the 30th September
in Siguenza, Spain.  Both workshops will provide lively forums for the
discussion of technologies, issues and challenges in the area of
Agents and Ontologies. We subsequently aim to publish a common volume
collecting the best papers from both events to produce a comprehensive
update on today's active research in the field

Registration
------------
Workshop participants must register for both the main AAMAS 2002
conference and this workshop by following the instructions at
http://autonomousAgents.org/2002/.

Organising Committee
-------------------- 
 - Stephen Cranefield, University of Otago, New Zealand 
 - Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA 
 - Steve Willmott, Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland 

Programme Committee
-------------------
 - Federico Bergenti, University of Parma (Italy)
 - Jean Bézivin, University of Nantes (France) 
 - Luis Bothelo, Adetti (Portugal)
 - Patricia Charlton, Motorola (France)
 - Monique Calisti, Whitestein Technologies (Switzerland)
 - Ulises Cortes, UPC Barcelona, (Spain)
 - Frank van Harmelen, Vrije University Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
 - Stefan Haustein, University of Dortmund (Germany)
 - Jim Hendler, University of Maryland (USA)
 - Noriaki Izumi, Shizuoka University (Japan)
 - Matthias Klusch, DFKI (Germany) 
 - Yannis Labrou, Powermarket.com (USA)
 - Ryusuke Masuoka, Fujitsu (Japan)
 - Frank McCabe, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, (USA)
 - Natalya Fridman Noy, Stanford University (USA) 
 - James Odell, James Odell Associates (USA)
 - Martin Purvis, University of Otago (New Zealand)
 - Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool (England)
 - Michael Uschold, Boeing (USA) 

Workshop Website
----------------
 http://autonomousAgents.org/2002/oas/

Received on Tuesday, 16 April 2002 01:35:39 UTC