Call for participation: 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Agents and the Semantic Web

Apologies for multiple postings

                 --- Agents and the Semantic Web ---

                   2005 AAAI Fall Symposium Series
                           Call for Papers

                        Arlington, Virginia, USA
                         3rd-6th November, 2005

              http://www.daml.ecs.soton.ac.uk/AAAI-FSS05/

TRAVEL BURSARIES STILL AVAILABLE,
for information please contact Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>


Invited Speakers:
=====
James Hendler, University of Maryland
Michael Wooldridge, University of Liverpool

Accepted papers:
=====
Dynamic Sub-Ontology Evolution for Collaborative Problem-Solving
Y. Mao, W. Cheung, Z. Wu, J. Liu

SEA: a Semantic Web Services Context-aware Execution Agent
A. Lopes, L. Botelho

Integrating Language Understanding Agents Into the Semantic Web
A. Java, T. Finin, S. Nirenburg

Integrating knowledge modeling and multi-agent systems
M. Gomez, E. Plaza

A Temporal Aggregates Ontology in OWL for the Semantic Web
F. Pan

Web Service Composition as a Planning Task: Experiments using  
Knowledge-Based Planning
E. Martinez, Y. Lesperance

Service Level Agreements for Semantic Web Agents
N. Oren, A. Preece, T. Norman

Semantic Web Service Composition Planning with OWLS-Xplan
M. Klusch, A. Gerber, M. Schmidt

Integrating Agents, Ontologies, and Semantic Web Services for  
Collaboration on the Semantic Web
M. Stollberg, S. Thomas

Protocols for Web Service Invocation
C. Walton

OWLS-MX: Hybrid OWL-S Service Matchmaking
M. Klusch, B. Fries, M. Khalid, K. Sycara

Template-based Composition of Semantic Web Services
E. Sirin, B. Parsia, J. Hendler

Interleaving Semantic Web Reasoning and Service Discovery
J. Rao, N. Sadeh

Preparing Semantic Agents for an Unsuspecting and Unreliable World
L. McDowell



Topics of interest
=====
The Semantic Web is based on the idea of dynamic, heterogeneous,
shared knowledge sources providing machine-readable content in a
similar way to that in which information is shared on the World
Wide Web.  Integral to this vision was a synergy with Multi-Agent
Systems technology; agents could utilize this knowledge to achieve
their own goals, producing new knowledge that could be disseminated
or published within a common framework.  Conversely, the Semantic
Web would benefit from autonomous, distributed agents responsible
for gathering/aggregating knowledge, reasoning and inferring new
facts, identifying and managing inconsistencies, and providing trust
and security mechanisms.

Previous workshops and discussion fora devoted to this topic have
mainly focused on either the semantic web aspect or the agent aspect
of the problem, and have failed to achieve an agreement on the
common research themes.   Thus there is a risk of missing significant
opportunities for sharing results in areas such as:

* Knowledge sharing. The agent paradigm is successfully employed
   in those applications where autonomous, heterogeneous, and  
distributed
   systems need to interoperate in order to achieve a common goal,
   however this is possible if agents are able to share knowledge.
   Ontologies are a powerful tool to achieve semantic interoperability
   among heterogeneous, distributed systems.

* Syntactic Unification. Data exchanged between service providers
   are typically based on different syntaxes and conceptual schemas,
   raising the problem of data mediation for interoperability.  
Ontologies,
   and mechanisms for mapping and translating across ontologies
   can address these problems.

  * Discovery of agent capabilities. Semantic-based discovery
   mechanisms and languages/ontologies for describing agent capabilities
   and predefined coordination mechanisms are needed to make the
   automatic discovery of services offered by agents and other
   providers.

* Agent coordination. Goal-directed composition typically involves
   planning across a space of existing actions, ensuring that data
   and control flow constraints are satisfied.  Model checking
   techniques are required to ensure valid compositions, as well as
   temporal reasoning to validate control flow dependences.    Such
   techniques need to accommodate semantic descriptions as well as
   avoiding live-lock situations that may lead to failure.

* Interaction Protocols. Different agents expect specific messages
   to be choreographed in a precisely defined manner. Integration
   has to guarantee and enforce the communication protocols.
   Interoperable description frameworks are thus required to ensure
   that both parties understand and adhere to interaction protocols.
   The semantics of the terms used in these protocols is made explicit
   in ontologies.

This symposium aims to promote and foster a greater understanding
of the synergy between Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web.

Topics of Interest include:
   - Semantic interoperability and integration
   - Distributed, autonomous knowledge-management
   - Dynamic, semantic mapping across ontologies;
   - Use of negotiation techniques for reaching consensus;
   - Evolution of ontologies in multi-agent systems;
   - Scalability and versioning of ontologies in multi-agent systems;
   - Centralized and Distributed mechanisms for service invocation/ 
enactment
   - Failure and Recovery mechanisms
   - Semantic descriptions of Autonomic mechanisms for robust,  
coordinated service communities
   - Semantic description, discovery, and selection of services and  
choreographies
   - Semantic Web Services (including OWL-S and WSMO)
   - Semantics in Agent Communication Languages
   - Semantics in Interaction Protocols
   - Semantics in Electronic Institutions
   - Semantics for service delegation and knowledge aggregation
   - Architectures for supporting Agents and Web Services within the  
Semantic Web

Dates
=====
Registration Deadline:        October 7th
Symposium:            November 3rd-6th


Organizing Committee
====================

Terry Payne (Co-chair)        University of Southampton
Valentina Tamma (Co-chair)    University of Liverpool
Bijan Parsia            University of Maryland
David Martin            SRI International
Simon Parsons            City University of New York
Nick Gibbins            University of Southampton

Program Committee
==================
Alice Mulvehill, BBN Technologies, MA
Alun Preece, University of Aberdeen, UK
Andreas Hess, University College, Dublin, Ireland
Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, MD
Boi Faltings, EPFL, Switzerland
Brian Blake, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Fabio Casati, HP Labs, CA
Chiara Ghidini, ITC, Italy
Chris Priest, HP Labs, UK
Chris Walton, University of Edinburgh, UK
Chris van Aart, NL
David Robertson, University of Edinburgh, UK
Dave de Roure, University of Southampton, UK
Enrico Motta, Open University, UK
Evren Sirin, University of Maryland, MD
Fabien Gandon, Inria, Sophia Antipolis, France
Filip Perich, Cougar Software, McLean, VA
Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL
Grit Denker, SRI, CA
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina, SC
John Domingue, Open University, UK
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, University of West Florida, FL
Jim Blythe, ISI, University of South California, CA
Julian Padget, University of Bath, UK
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, PA
Ian J. Dickinson, HP Labs, UK
Ion Costantinescu, EPFL, Switzerland
Kaoru Hiramatsu, NTT Corporation, Japan
Mark Burstein, BBN Technologies, MA
Mark S. Fox, Univerity of Toronto, Canada
Marta Sabou, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL
Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Germany
Michael Klein, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Monica Crubezy, University of Stanfard, CA
Monika Solanki, De Montfort Univeristy, UK
Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University, NC
Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University, PA
Onn Shehory, IBM, Israel
Ora Lassila, Nokia
Paul Buhler, College of Charleston, SC
Ramanathan Guha, IBM Almaden Research Center, CA
Pete Edwards, University of Aberdeen, UK
Richard Benjamins, iSOCO, Spain
Ronald Ashri, University of Southampton, UK
Ryusuke Masuoka, Fujitsu Labs of America, MD
Sheila MacIlraith, University of Toronto, Canada
Simon Thompson, BT Labs, UK
Stefan Decker, DERI, Ireland
Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz, Germany
Steve Battle, HP Labs, UK
Stephen Cranefield, Otago University, New Zeland
Steven Willmott, University of Catalunya, Spain
David Trastour, HP Labs, UK
Mike Uschold, Boeing, WA
Walter Binder, EPFL, Switzerland
Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, MD
Lalana Kagal, MIT, MA
Carine Bournez, W3C
Ashok Mallya, North Carolina State, NC
Mary Pulvermacher, MITRE Corporation, CO
Yannis Labrou, Fujitsu Labs of America, MD
Yolanda Gil, ISI, University of South California, CA

Received on Monday, 3 October 2005 12:35:30 UTC