EKAW 2002 Workshop on

Ontologies for Multi-Agent Systems

30 September 2002, Siguenza, Spain

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~valli/OMAS-CFP.html

Motivation Related events Topics of interest Submissions Publication Programme Important Dates Programme Committee Organisers


Workshop sponsored by:


AgentLink member

Workshop supported by:


HP Laboratories            OntoWeb member



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



   

The workshop programme is now available here.



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 at the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems Conference, Bologna, 15-16 July 2002

Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems held at Autonomous Agents, 2001
Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce, AAAI 2000
WWW2002 international workshop on the Semantic Web, Hawaii, May 7, 2002

The workshop shares interests with the following efforts, just to mention a few:
Darpa Agent Markup Language
Ontoweb
AgentLink Special Interest Group on Intelligent Information Agents

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/lcns/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.
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
Submission closed
Notification of acceptanceJuly, 15th
Camera ready dueAugust, 15th
Workshop September, 30

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 Fernández-López, 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
Asunción Gómez-Pérez , Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Dean Jones, Definiens AG, Germany
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
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
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
heiner@cs.vu.nl

Last modified, July 26th 2002