CFP: AAMAS'03 workshop on Web Services and Agent-Based Engineering

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                C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S


                         Workshop on

        WEB SERVICES AND AGENT-BASED ENGINEERING (WSABE)

                http://agentus.com/WSABE2003/


                      to be held at the
         The Second International Joint Conference on
      Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2003)
               http://www.aamas-conference.org/

                    Melbourne, Australia
              14 or 15 July 2003 (to be decided)
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DESCRIPTION

The wide spread of Internet technologies is having an important impact
on the way businesses deal with their partners and customers. To
remain competitive, traditional businesses are under the pressure to
take advantage of the information revolution the Internet and the Web
have brought about. Most businesses are adopting Web-based approaches
for more automation, efficient business processes, personalization,
and worldwide visibility.

Web services are one of the technologies that could help businesses in
being more Web-oriented. Web services are a rapidly expanding approach
to building distributed software systems across networks such as the
Internet. A Web service is an operation typically addressed via a URI,
declaratively described using widely accepted standards, and accessed
via platform-independent XML-based messages. The development of
industry standards, products, and tools for supporting Web service
system development is proceeding at a very rapid rate. Standards exist
for service discovery (UDDI), description (WSDL), coordination (BPML,
BPEL4WS, WSCI), and communication (SOAP). Despite all the efforts that
are spent on Web services research and development, many businesses
are still struggling with how to put their core business competences
on the Internet as a collection of Web services.

While a Web service need not fulfill all characteristics of a strong
definition of agency, the Web services approach to building complex
software systems bears many similarities to the engineering process of
a collection of software agents. In particular, large systems are
assembled from distributed heterogeneous software components providing
specialized services and communicating using agreed-upon protocols.
Similarly to certain multi-agent engineering paradigms, the design
process of such systems focuses on the declarative characterization of
the agents' capabilities and on a message-based paradigm of
interoperation.

The area of Web Services offers much of real interest to the Multi
Agent community, including similarities in system architectures,
powerful tools, and the focus on issues such as security and
reliability. Similarly, techniques developed in the Multi Agent
research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast
growing technology.


TOPICS

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the recent and significant
developments in the general area of Web Services and software agents
and to promote cross-fertilization of techniques. We seek original and
high quality submissions that apply Multi Agent research to Web
Service frameworks and vice versa in innovative and interesting ways.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
* Architectures and infrastructure for distributed agent- or service-
  based frameworks;
* Agent-based modelling and design techniques to address problems in
  web service system development;
* Process modeling (e.g. workflow-, planning-, logic-based approaches)
  for service/agent composition, orchestration and coordination;
* Multi-agent techniques to describing, organizing, and discovering
  web services;
* Ontology or semantic-based approaches to describing and classifying
  services and capabilities;
* Using speech acts, performatives, and conversational models for web
  service specification and coordination;
* Use of agent-based approaches for web service personalization;
* Security support for agents and services, and agent-based approaches
  to service security;
* Transactional integrity for long-running transactions in service-
  or agent-systems;
* Intelligent matchmaking and service brokering;
* Pricing and payment models for Web services;
* Web service agreements, legal contracts, and social commitments
  between trading partners;
* Interoperability of web services;
* In-depth critiques of web service standards, comparison to agent
  community standards, and their adequacy for agent based solutions;
* Services and the semantic web, including initiatives such as DAML-S;
* Infrastructure and architectures for M-services;
* Use of web service infrastructure and tools for building multi-agent
  systems.


SUBMISSION and PUBLICATION

Authors should send PostScript (compressed) or PDF versions of their
paper, or provide a URL for an online version, by email to Lawrence
Cavedon (lcavedon@csli.stanford.edu) by the deadline specified
below. Hardcopy submission is discouraged.

Two types of submissions are available: regular submissions of length
3000-4000 words (approx. 8-12 printed pages) and position papers of
length 1200-2000 words (approx. 4-6 printed pages). Position papers,
and some regular papers, will be presented as part of themed dicussion
panels.

Authors should provide a separate *plain text* message that includes
the following:
* the full contact details (including full name, postal address, email
  address) of at least one author;
* the category (regular or position paper) of the submission;
* a list of keywords indicating the topic area of the paper;
* an abstract of approximately 100-200 words.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by multiple reviewers. Selection
criteria will include: relevance, significance, impact, originality,
technical soundness, quality of presentation. Some preference may also
be given to papers which adhere to emergent trends and important
common themes.
Since this is associated with the AAMAS conference, accepted papers
must be of real relevance to the multi-agent research community.

Accepted papers will be made available in electronic form prior to the
workshop and a printed collection will be available at the workshop.
The organizers are negotiating for a volume or journal special issue
to be published dedicated to a selection of the accepted papers;
accepted authors will have the opportunity to revise their papers
after the workshop.


WORKSHOP FORMAT and ATTENDANCE

The workshop will aim to foster discussion and develop action outcomes
on key issues relating to designing and building systems using Web
Services and Software Agents. As well as regular presentations, a
number of discussion panels on identified important themes are also
planned.

Invited keynote speakers discussing recent developments of Software
Agents and Web Services in terms of standards, tools, issues, and
applications are also planned.

Attendance may be restricted by the venue. A separate call for
participation will be distributed at about the time of acceptance
notification. If attendance needs to be limited then preference will
be given first to presenters and next to other authors who submitted.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions due              March 31, 2003
Notifications sent           May 14, 2003
Workshop                     14 or 15 July 2002 (actual date TBD)


WORKSHOP COMMITTEES

Co-chairs

Lawrence Cavedon     (primary contact)
Center for the Study of Language and Information
Stanford University, USA
lcavedon@csli.stanford.edu

Zakaria Maamar
College of Information Systems
Zayed University, UAE
zakaria.maamar@zu.ac.ae


Organizing committee

Boualem Benatallah, University of New South Wales, Australia
Lawrence Cavedon, Stanford University, USA
Adam Cheyer, Dejima, Inc., USA
David Kinny, Agentis Software, Inc., Australia
Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, UAE
David Martin, SRI International, USA
Donald Steiner, WebV2, Inc., USA


Program committee

M. Brian Blake, Georgetown University, USA
Jeffrey Bradshaw, IHMC/University of West Florida, USA
Fabio Casati, Hewlett-Packard, USA
Marlon Dumas, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Larbi Esmahi, Athabasca University, Canada
Tim Finin, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Jarle Hulaas, Centre Universitaire de Geneve, Switzerland
Ahmed Kamel, North Dakota State University, USA
Manolis Koubarakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Qusay Mahmoud, Guelph University, Canada
Wathiq Mansoor, Zayed University, UAE
Alan Messer, Samsung Electronics, USA
Guy Mineau, Laval University, Canada
Ghita Kouadri Mostefaoui, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Soraya Kouadri Mostefaoui, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Bernard Moulin, Laval University, Canada
Anne Hee Hiong Ngu, Southwest Texas State University, USA
Bijan Parsia, University of Maryland College Park, USA
Terry Payne, University of Southampton, UK
Elhadi Shakshuki, Acadia University, Canada
Weiming Shen, NRC-London, Canada
Quan Z. Sheng, University of New South Wales, Australia
Eleni Stroulia, University of Alberta, Canada
Jeff Sutherland, PatientKeeper, Inc., USA
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Zahir Tari, RMIT University, Australia
Amund Tveit, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Hamdi Yahyaoui, Laval University, Canada
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Received on Tuesday, 14 January 2003 02:46:46 UTC