Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems

Welcome to the Ontologies in Agent Systems Workshop pages. The workshop is the third in a series of workshops on Ontologies and Agent Systems (the previous workshops were held at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents 2001 in Montreal, Canada and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002 in Bologna, Italy). It aims to provide a forum to foster discussion on the issues involved in using ontologies to support interactions between software agents. Particular areas of interest are:

  1. Practical experience and considerations in designing applications where interactions are based on ontologies, and the infrastructural support required for their effective use.

  2. Discussion of the dependencies between ontologies, their supporting technologies and other aspects of agent systems such as agent architectures, and interaction mechanisms (coordination, communication, etc.).

  3. Comparison of different ontology representation approaches for use in agent systems.
Emphasis will be on the discussion of ontologies with respect to the practical impact they have on agent architecture and application design.

Latest News

10 July, 2003 Workshop programme announced.
19 May, 2003 Accepted papers announced.
31 March, 2003 Submission deadline extended.
25 March, 2003 The Confman system is now available for online paper registration and upload.
19 March, 2003 Sample ontology for the challenge problem now available
7 March, 2003 Workshop challenge problem released (later than expected - sorry!).
23 January, 2003 Workshop call issued.

Important Dates

Abstract submissions due:April 10, 2003 (extended deadline)
Submissions due:April 13, 2003 (extended deadline)
Author notification due:May 5, 2003 (changed date)
Camera-ready papers due:May 21, 2003 (extended deadline)
Date of workshop:July 15, 2003

Call for Papers

The call for papers can be found on line here:

Background

There is a growing interest in the use of ontologies in agent systems as a means to facilitate interoperability among diverse software components, in particular, where interoperability is achieved through the explicit modelling of the intended meaning of the concepts used in the interaction between diverse information sources, software components and/or service-providing software. The problems arising from the creation, maintenance, use and sharing of such semantic descriptions are perceived as critical to future commercial and non-commercial information networks, and are being highlighted by a number of recent large-scale initiatives to create open environments that support the interaction of many diverse systems (e.g. Agentcities, Grid computing, the Semantic Web and Web Services). A common thread across these initiatives is the need to support the synergy between ontology and agent technology, and increasingly, the multi-agent systems and ontology research communities are seeking to work together to solve common problems.

Target Audience

The workshop aims to bring together researchers from a number of different communities including (but not limited to):

  • Researchers working on ontology representation languages and modelling techniques including (but not limited to):
    • Ontology engineering approaches providing methodologies to build correct and reusable ontologies such as: Tove, Methontology and the Knowledge Meta-Process
    • AI knowledge representation approaches such as conceptual graphs, description logics and frame-based languages
    • Object-oriented and other software engineering modelling formalisms derived from (for example) UML, ODL, IDL
    • Semantic Web ontology-description languages derived from XML, RDF and RDFS such as OIL and DAML, or OWL.
  • Agent communication researchers investigating the links between various aspects of agent communication and/or those working on the integration of ontology tools with agent development and software design systems.
  • Researchers and developers actively applying ontology tools and resources for applications development or in particular research fields.

Submission details

Since the objective of the workshop is to enable lively discussion, we encourage all participants to submit a paper (workshop space may be limited, so paper authors will receive priority in workshop registration). Papers may be one of three types:

  • Short papers: These may be from two to four pages and should describe a problem or research issue that you consider to be important and/or on which you are working.
  • Regular papers: These may be up to eight pages in length and should describe original research work.
  • Challenge papers: A workshop challenge problem has been set based on the ontology tool assessment exercise organised by the EU OntoWeb project (SIG on Enterprise-Standard ontology environments), the first results of which were presented in the EKAW'02 workshop on evaluation of ontology-based tools (EON'02). Whereas the OntoWeb challenge focused on the ontology modelling process for a given domain, our challenge requires tackling agent interaction and coordination issues using messages with content expressed in terms of the domain ontology. Papers responding to the workshop challenge must have no more than eight pages of text, but additional pages of diagrams are permitted.

Papers should be submitted online via the Confman system. Papers should be in PostScript or PDF format. Please ensure that all non-standard fonts are embedded in the file. Note to Microsoft Word users: before converting your paper to PostScript or PDF, please check that under Compatibility Options you do not have the option "Use printer font metrics to lay out document" selected.

All accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, but some regular or challenge papers may be accepted as short papers, in which case a revised version of no more than four pages must be submitted for inclusion in the proceedings. Time may not be available at the workshop for the presentation of short papers, but the authors will be invited to take part in a panel discussion at the end of the relevant session of the workshop.

All papers should be formatted following the style of ACM conference proceedings (but the copyright box and ACM index terms are not required). Templates for Word, WordPerfect and LaTeX are available at: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Publication

All accepted papers will be available on the day of the workshop in a set of working notes. A more formal publication will be considered.

Cooperation

This workshop is being held in cooperation with the IJCAI 2003 Workshop on Ontologies and Distributed Systems and the AAMAS Agentcities: Challenges in Open Agent Systems Workshop.

Registration

Workshop participants must register for both the AAMAS 2003 conference and this workshop by following the instructions at:

Organising committee

  • Stephen Cranefield, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
  • Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
  • Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
  • Steve Willmott, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
  • Programme committee

    • Richard Benjamins, iSOCO (Spain)
    • Federico Bergenti, University of Parma (Italy)
    • Luis Botelho, ADETTI (Portugal)
    • Monique Calisti, Whitestein Technologies (Switzerland)
    • Ulises Cortes, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain)
    • Ian Dickinson, HP Laboratories (UK)
    • Noriaki Izumi, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (Japan)
    • Yannis Labrou, Fujitsu Laboratories of America (USA)
    • Frank McCabe, Fujitsu Laboratories of America (USA)
    • Marian Nodine, Telcordia Austin Research Center (USA)
    • Natalya Noy, Stanford University (USA)
    • James Odell, James Odell Associates (USA)
    • Martin Purvis, University of Otago (New Zealand)
    • Leon Sterling, University of Melbourne (Australia)
    • Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
    • Mike Uschold, Boeing (USA)

    PC Member Access



    To be held at AAMAS 2003