CFP: AAMAS Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems

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

                                OAS 2003
      Third International Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems

                           to be held at the
                    2nd International Conference on
                 Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems
                          Melbourne, Australia

                           14 or 15 July 2003

		     http://oas.otago.ac.nz/OAS2003/
                             -------------

Background
----------
There is a growing interest in the use of ontologies in agent systems
as a means to facilitate interoperability among diverse software
components, in particular, where interoperability is achieved through
the explicit modelling of the intended meaning of the concepts used in
the interaction between diverse information sources, software
components and/or service-providing software.  The problems arising
from the creation, maintenance, use and sharing of such semantic
descriptions are perceived as critical to future commercial and
non-commercial information networks, and are being highlighted by a
number of recent large-scale initiatives to create open environments
that support the interaction of many diverse systems (e.g. Agentcities,
Grid computing, the Semantic Web and Web Services).  A common thread
across these initiatives is the need to support the synergy between
ontology and agent technology, and increasingly, the multi-agent
systems and ontology research communities are seeking to work together
to solve common problems.

Workshop Objectives
-------------------
The workshop is the third in a series of workshops on Ontologies and
Agent Systems (the previous workshops were held at the International
Conference on Autonomous Agents 2001 in Montreal, Canada and the
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
2002 in Bologna, Italy).  It aims to provide a forum to foster
discussion on the issues involved in using ontologies to support
interactions between software agents.  Emphasis will be on the
discussion of ontologies with respect to the practical impact they
have on agent architecture and application design.

Topics of Interest
------------------
Topics of interest include (but are not restricted to):

* Practical experience and considerations in designing applications
   where interactions are based on ontologies, and the infrastructural
   support required for their effective use.

* Discussion of the dependencies between ontologies, their supporting
   technologies and other aspects of agent systems such as agent
   architectures, and interaction mechanisms (coordination,
   communication, etc.).

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

* 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.

* The role of standards for ontology representation and communication

Target Audience
---------------
The workshop aims to bring together researchers from a number of
different communities including (but not limited to):

* Researchers working on ontology representation languages and
   modelling techniques including (but not limited to):

   - Ontology engineering approaches providing methodologies to build
     correct and reusable ontologies such as: Tove, Methontology and
     the Knowledge Meta-Process
   - AI knowledge representation approaches such as conceptual graphs,
     description logics and frame-based languages
   - Object-oriented and other software engineering modelling
     formalisms derived from (for example) UML, ODL, IDL
   - Semantic Web ontology-description languages derived from XML, RDF
     and RDFS such as OIL and DAML, or OWL.

* Agent communication researchers investigating the links between
   various aspects of agent communication and/or those working on the
   integration of ontology tools with agent development and software
   design systems.

* Researchers and developers actively applying ontology tools and
   resources for applications development or in particular research
   fields.

Important Dates
---------------
Abstract submissions due:               27 March 2003
Paper submissions due:                  30 March 2003
Author notification:                    28 April 2003
Camera-ready papers due:                11 May 2003
Date of workshop:                       14 or 15 July 2003

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

* Short papers: These may be from two to four pages and should
   describe a problem or research issue that you consider to be
   important and/or on which you are working.

* Regular papers: These may be up to eight pages in length and should
   describe original research work.

* Challenge papers: A workshop challenge problem has been set and is
   discussed on the workshop Web page.  It builds on the ontology tool
   assessment exercise organised by the EU OntoWeb project (SIG on
   Enterprise-Standard ontology environments), the first results of
   which were presented in the EKAW'02 workshop on evaluation of
   ontology-based tools (EON'02).  Whereas the OntoWeb challenge
   focused on the ontology modelling process for a given domain, our
   challenge requires tackling agent interaction and coordination
   issues using messages whose content is expressed in terms of the
   domain ontology.  Papers responding to the workshop challenge must
   have no more than eight pages of text, but additional pages of
   diagrams are permitted.

All accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, but
some regular or challenge papers may be accepted as short papers, in
which case a revised version of no more than four pages must be
submitted for inclusion in the proceedings.  Time may not be available
at the workshop for the presentation of short papers, but the authors
will be invited to take part in a panel discussion at the end of the
relevant session of the workshop.

All papers should be formatted following the style of ACM conference
proceedings (but the copyright box and ACM index terms are not
required).  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://oas.otago.ac.nz/OAS2003/).

Publication
-----------
All accepted papers will be available on the day of the workshop in a
set of working notes and will also be published on the Web. A more
formal publication will be considered.

Cooperation
-----------
This workshop is being held in cooperation with the IJCAI 2003
Workshop on Ontologies and Distributed Systems and the AAMAS
Agentcities: Challenges in Open Agent Systems Workshop.

Registration
------------
Workshop participants must register for both the main AAMAS 2003
conference and this workshop by following the instructions at
http://www.aamas-conference.org/.

Organising Committee
--------------------
* Stephen Cranefield, University of Otago (New Zealand)
* Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA)
* Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool (UK)
* Steve Willmott, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain)

Program Committee
-----------------
* Richard Benjamins, iSOCO (Spain)
* Federico Bergenti, University of Parma (Italy)
* Luis Botelho, ADETTI (Portugal)
* Monique Calisti, Whitestein Technologies (Switzerland)
* Ian Dickinson, HP Laboratories (UK)
* Noriaki Izumi, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
   Technology (Japan)
* Yannis Labrou, Fujitsu Laboratories of America (USA)
* Frank McCabe, Fujitsu Laboratories of America (USA)
* Marian Nodine, Telcordia Austin Research Center (USA)
* Natalya Noy, Stanford University (USA)
* James Odell, James Odell Associates (USA)
* Martin Purvis, University of Otago (New Zealand)
* Leon Sterling, University of Melbourne (Australia)
* Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
* Mike Uschold, Boeing (USA)


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Received on Monday, 10 March 2003 16:39:54 UTC