EKAW workshop on ontologies for multi-agent systems

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*                         [Apologies for cross posting]                       *
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*   Call For Paper: EKAW 2002 Workshop on Ontologies for Multi-AgentSystems   *
*                               30 September 2002,                            *
*                                 Siguenza, Spain,                            *
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*                http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~valli/OMAS-CFP.html                *
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DUE TO A NUMBER OF REQUESTS THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO JUNE 15th

This workshop is held in cooperation with the AAMAS 2002 Workshop
on  "Ontologies in Agent Systems" to be held on 15-16 July in Bologna,
Italy. Both workshops will provide lively forums for discussion of
technologies, issues and challenges in the area of Ontologies and
Agents.

NEW: AgentLink travel grants available
AgentLink sponsors two travel grants for students at an institution which is an
AgentLink member node.
The grants will provide full or partial support for travel and registration
fees. A maximum of 500 Euros for each grant will be available.
Applicants should send their contact information and a brief description of
their current research to Valentina Tamma (valli@csc.liv.ac.uk)
not later than August, 1st, 2002.
Preference will be given to those students who have a paper accepted
for presentation at the workshop.


Motivation
----------
The workshop intends to support and consolidate the growing interest
in the use of ontologies for multi-agent system applications. On the
one hand, the agent paradigm is successfully employed in those applications
where autonomous, loosely-coupled, heterogeneous, and  distributed
systems need to interoperate in order to achieve a common goal.
On the other hand, ontologies have established themselves as a
powerful tool to enable knowledge sharing, and a growing number of
applications have benefited from the use of ontologies as a means to
achieve semantic interoperability among heterogeneous, distributed systems.
In practice, the application areas of these technologies often
overlap, for example: e-commerce, intelligent information integration,
and web services.
Increasingly, the multi-agent systems and ontology research
communities are seeking to work together to solve common problems. A
key focus to this joint working is emerging in ideas for the semantic
web. Both ontologies and agent technologies are central to the
semantic web, and their combined use will enable
the sharing of heterogeneous, autonomous knowledge sources  in a scalable,
adaptable and extensible manner.
The workshop on ontologies for multi-agent systems will complement the
analogous track at the main EKAW conference, by providing a discussion
forum for the two communities in order to explore trade-offs, current 
achievements and possible pitfalls in the use of ontologies for 
multi-agent systems. 
The goal of this workshop is to foster fruitful discussions. We
therefore encourage anybody with an interest to attend the workshop
and submit technical or position papers to add fuel to discussion and 
share experiences and ideas. 


Related Events
--------------

Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems to be held the Autonomous
Agents and MultiAgent Systems Conference, Bologna, 15-16 July 2002
http://www.autonomousagents.org/2002/oas

Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems held at Autonomous Agents, 2001
http://cis.otago.ac.nz/OASWorkshop/ 

Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce, AAAI 2000
http://www.igec.umbc.edu/kbem/

WWW2002
international workshop on the Semantic Web</a>, Hawaii, May 7, 2002
http://semanticweb2002.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de

The workshop  shares interests with the following efforts, just to
mention a few:
Darpa Agent Markup Language
http://www.daml.org

OntoWeb
http://www.ontoweb.org

AgentLink Special Interest Group on Intelligent Information Agents
http://www.dbgroup.unimo.it/IIA/

Topics of Interest
------------------
The main topics of interest include but are not restricted to:

* Requirements for ontology representations to be used by agent
systems. 
This includes discussion of expressive power and possible inferences
supported by ontology based languages, web based languages, and other 
languages used in agent applications;

* Requirements of  agent architectures to use ontologies to support
semantic interoperability among agents. This includes experiences with
architectures that have already been successfully implemented, use cases, and
comparative studies of different architectures;

* Expressive power of ontology content in relation to
the semantics of the different aspects of interoperation. This includes the
balance between the representational capability of the performatives
and that of the message content ontologies, but also the balance
between the content and the operational
aspects of interoperation, which is needed for cooperation patterns,
rational interactions (such as negotiation, bargaining, auctions),
coalition formation, etc.; 

* Dynamic, semantic mapping across ontologies;

* Use of negotiation techniques for reaching consensus on terms
used in heterogeneous, distributed multi-agent systems, but also the
agreement on and use of consensual terminology for enabling negotiation;

* Evolution of ontologies in multi-agent systems;

* Scalability and versioning of ontologies in multi-agent systems;

* Use of ontologies and agents in different technological contexts such as
the semantic web, web services, and e-commerce, enterprise modelling, etc.;

* Ontology based semantic routing;

* Practical experiences of multi-agent systems using ontologies;

* Cross standardisation issues, which include on the one hand the
inclusion of ontologies in the current proposals for agents' standards
and on the other hand the operational aspects of emerging ontology standards. 

Submissions
-----------
Papers  are  solicited  for  any  of  the topics  of
interest listed  above.
We invite contributions of different kinds. We solicit regular
research papers which may report on: 
- completed work;
- description of current, but mature, work in progress; 
- discussion papers comparing different approaches, or account of
practical experiences of using ontologies in multi-agent system applications.
In addition, we invite people wishing to participate in the workshop to
submit a short position paper concerning statements of interest, or
technical or policy issues. 
Spaces will be limited and those who have submitted a paper will be
given priority for registration.
Both type of papers  will provide the
framework for the discussions during the workshop. 
 Papers must be written in English.
Submitted papers  will be  reviewed
by at  least three members  of the programme committee, and selected
on  the basis of their relevance and originality. 
Both research and position papers should be formatted according to
the official formatting guidelines of the EKAW main conference (LNAI style
available online at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).
Research papers should not exceed sixteen pages, while position
statements should not exceed five pages.
The URL of the paper in Postscript, Adobe PDF or HTML format should be
mailed to the main contact person.

Publication
-----------
All accepted papers (both technical and position papers) will be
available on the day of the workshop in a set of working notes.
Accepted papers will also made available in electronic format before
the day of the workshop. Arrangements are being made to publish
selected papers in a special edition of a journal.

We subsequently aim to publish a common volume collecting the best
papers from this workshop and the AAMAS 2002 workshop on "Ontologies in Agent
Systems".
The goal is to produce a comprehensive update on today's active
research in the field.

Important Dates
---------------
Paper submission deadline: June, 15th
Notification of acceptance: July, 15th
Travel grants deadline: August, 1st
Camera ready due: August, 15th 
Workshop: 30 September 2002

Programme Committee
-------------------
Trevor Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom;           
V. Richard Benjamins, ISOCO, Spain;
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena, Italy;
Stephen Cranefield, University of Otago, New Zealand;
Vadim Ermolayev, Zaporozhye State University, Ukraine;
Mariano Fernandez-Lopez, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain;
Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA;         
Enrico Franconi, University of Manchester, United Kingdom;
Natalya Fridman Noy, Stanford University, USA;                   
Asuncion Gomez-Perez, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain;   
Dean Jones, BT exact, United Kingdom;                           
Michael Luck, Southampton University, United Kingdom;            
Enrico Motta, Open University, United Kingdom;                    
Luc Schneider, LADSEB CNR, Italy;                                 
Ingo Timm, University of Bremen, Germany;                         
Ubbo Visser, University of Bremen, Germany;      
Steven Willmott, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland; 
Mike Wooldridge, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom;              

Organisers
----------
All enquiries and submissions should be directed to the contact person:

Valentina Tamma (main contact)
Department of Computer Science
University of Liverpool
Chadwick Building, Peach Street, 
Liverpool L69 7ZF
United Kingdom,
Tel. +44-151-794 6797
Fax. +44-151-794 3715
Email: valli@csc.liv.ac.uk

Ian Dickinson
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories,
Filton Road,
Stoke Gifford,
Bristol, BS34 8QZ
United Kigdom,
Tel: +44-117-312 8796
Fax: +44-117-312 8924
Email: ian_dickinson@hp.com

Heiner Stuckenschmidt
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, 
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 
De Boelelaan 1081a, 
1081 HV Amsterdam, 
The Netherlands, 
Tel: +31-20-444 7818
Fax: +31-20-444 7653
Email: heiner@cs.vu.nl

-- 
 
Valentina Tamma
Agents Applications, Research and Technology Group
Department of Computer Science                  
University of Liverpool
Chadwick Building (room 1.11)      
Peach Street                       
Liverpool L69 7ZF                          
UK

e-mail: valli@csc.liv.ac.uk
phone: +44-151-794 6797
fax:   +44-151-794 3715
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~valli/

Received on Saturday, 8 June 2002 15:22:41 UTC