---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Last CFP: Agents 2001 Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 17:59:23 +1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time) From: Stephen Cranefield scranefield@infoscience.otago.ac.nz To: ontology@fipa.org, ontology@cs.umbc.edu, agents@cs.umbc.edu, www-rdf-interest@w3.org, www-rdf-logic@w3.org, kaw@swi.psy.uva.nl, oil-list@cs.vu.nl

NOTE: Submission deadline extended to March 16.

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

OAS 2001 Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems

to be held at the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents Montreal, Canada

29th May 2001

http://www.AutonomousAgents.org/2001/oas/ -------------

Our apologies if you receive this multiple times.

Abstract --------

OAS2001 will provide a forum for the discussion and comparison of different approaches to the representation of ontologies for agent systems, the practical considerations of designing applications using these techniques and the infrastructural support required for their effective use.

The workshop will be held at the Autonomous Agents 2001 conference taking place in Montreal, Canada from May 28 to June 1, 2001.

Important Dates ---------------

Paper submission deadline: Friday 16th March 2001 (extended from 9th March) Author notification: Monday 2nd April 2001 Camera-ready copy deadline: Friday 13th April 2001 Date of Workshop: Tuesday 29th May 2001

Background ----------

The potential benefits and technical difficulties of sharing information between heterogeneous and distributed agents (both human and software) have led various research communities to develop techniques for explicitly modelling the concepts used within information sources and service-providing software to express their contents and responses. Whether these conceptual models are called ontologies, schemas or data models, they enable applications to be assembled from loosely-coupled heterogeneous and distributed components. Many of these techniques can be applied or extended to the knowledge-level modelling and communication fundamental to multi-agent systems, and each brings its own trade-offs. Current widespread research and commercial activity in this area suggests that the communities involved would benefit from a forum to discuss issues in the wide-scale practical use of ontologies in agent systems:

* There are increasing efforts to apply ontology modelling techniques to agent applications.

* Research efforts such as DARPA's CoABS Grid and Agentcities, as well as commercial developments like UDDI are working to link together large numbers of heterogenous systems.

* Initiatives such as ebXML and BizTalk are encouraging Industry to create a large amount of machine-readable ontological data.

These points indicate great potential for the practical use of ontologies within agent systems - both in research and commercial settings.

Workshop Objectives -------------------

Against this background the goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for the discussion of the practical use of ontologies in agent-based applications.

Specifically the workshop aims to:

* Compare and contrast different ontology representation approaches for use in agent systems.

* Address the practical considerations of designing applications using these techniques and the infrastructural support required for their effective use.

* Discuss the dependencies between ontologies and their supporting technologies and other aspects of agent systems such as agent architectures and communication mechanisms.

Throughout, emphasis will be on the discussion of ontologies with respect to the impact they have on agent architecture and application design in the context of agent systems.

Workshop Format ---------------

The workshop will take place over one day and be divided into three technical sessions (provisionally these will be dedicated to the three primary workshop objectives) and one panel session to discuss issues arising during the day's discussions.

Topics of Interest ------------------

The main topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Strengths and weaknesses of current ontology representation approaches for use with agents - both specific technologies and generic techniques such as logic-based and object-oriented approaches and those based on Semantic Web models.

* Relationships between ontology modelling languages and agent communication mechanisms: what are the dependencies between (for example) the semantics of a communication language and what can be expressed in the ontology?

* Techniques for translation between different ontology representation languages and coping with the evolution of ontologies.

* Meta-modelling or other techniques for clarifying the relationship between ontologies and agents' messaging and reasoning systems.

* Practical experience in building agent systems using explicit ontologies to support communication.

* Requirements for ontology support in agent applications and agent toolkits including support access to existing (e.g. Web-based) ontology resources.

* Classifications identifying which approaches are most appropriate for particular applications or communication requirements.

Paper Submission ----------------

Since space is limited, participation is by invitation only. All participants must submit either a short position statement or a full length paper. Position statements may be no more than two pages and should describe a problem or research issue that you consider to be important or on which you are working. Full length papers may be up to eight pages in length and should describe original work related to workshop topics.

Papers may be entirely new work, discussion papers weighing up different approaches, descriptions of applications or requirements, or accounts of practical experiences. Accepted full length papers will be included in the proceedings and considered for presentation. Position statements may also be included in the proceedings at the discretion of the authors.

Both kinds of papers should be formatted following the style of ACM conference proceedings. Templates for Word, WordPerfect and LaTeX are available at: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

Papers can be submitted electronically via the workshop Website.

Publication -----------

All accepted papers will be available on the day of the workshop in a set of working notes. Arrangements are being made to publish selected papers in a special edition of a journal or other form of publication (details to be announced).

Registration ------------

Workshop participants must register for the main Autonomous Agents 2001 conference as well as this workshop by following the instructions at http://www.AutonomousAgents.org/2001/.

Organising Committee --------------------

Stephen Cranefield, University of Otago, New Zealand Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA Steve Willmott, Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland

Programme Committee -------------------

Federico Bergenti, Universita Degli Studi di Parma, Italy Monique Calisti, Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland Patricia Charlton, Motorola Research, France Ulises Cortes, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain Stefan Decker, Stanford University, USA Stefan Haustein, Universitaet Dortmund, Germany Pat Hayes, University of Western Florida, USA James Hendler, DARPA/ISO/University of Maryland at College Park, USA Noriaki Izumi, Shizuoka University, Japan Matthias Klusch, Deutsche Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz - DFKI, Germany Yannis Labrou, Powermarket.com, USA Frank McCabe, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, USA Ryusuke Masuoka, Fujitsu, Japan Martin Purvis, University of Otago, New Zealand Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Workshop Website ----------------

http://www.AutonomousAgents.org/2001/oas/

-------------------------------------------------------