[DL] 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Agents and the Semantic Web

[Valentina Tamma]

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/

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

Submissions
===========

Papers are solicited for the issues discussed above. We invite
contributions of different kinds. We solicit regular research
papers which may report on:

   - Full Papers (8 pages) completed work;
   - Extended Abstracts (3 pages) summarising current (but mature)
     work in progress (accepted abstracts should be extended to full
     papers for the symposium proceedings)
   - Position papers (4 pages) comparing different approaches, or
     account of practical experiences of using Agent technologies
     within a Semantic Web Environment.

All accepted 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.  A selection of the best papers will be published in a
post-symposium volume.

Both research and position papers should be formatted according to the
official formatting guidelines of AAAI available at
http://aaai.org/Publications/Author/electronic-submissions.html

The URL of the paper in Postscript, Adobe PDF format can be
submitted electronically.  Details on electronic submission
can be found at http://www.daml.ecs.soton.ac.uk/AAAI-FSS05/

Dates
=====
Paper submissions:		April 25th
Acceptance Notifications:	May 23rd
Camera ready copies:		tbd
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
==================
Alun Preece, University of Aberdeen, UK
Andreas Hess, University College, Dublin, Ireland
Brian Blake, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Chiara Ghidini, ITC, Italy
Chris Priest, HP Labs, UK
Chris Walton, University of Edinburgh, UK
David Robertson, University of Edinburgh, UK
Evren Sirin, University of Maryland, MD
Fabien Gandon, Inria, Sophia Antipolis, France
Filip Perich, Cougar Software, McLean, VA
Ian Dickinson, HP Labs, UK
Ion Costantinescu, EPFL, Switzerland
Jeffrey Bradshaw, University of West Florida, FL
John Domingue, Open University, UK
Julian Padget, University of Bath, UK
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, PA
Kaoru Hiramatsu, NTT Corporation, Japan
Marta Sabou, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL
Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Germany
Michael Klein, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Michael Huhns, University of  South Carolina, SC
Monica Crubezy, University of Stanfard, CA
Monika Solanki, De Montfort Univeristy, UK
Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University, PA
Onn Shehory, IBM, Israel
Paul Buhler, College of Charleston,
Pete Edwards, University of Aberdeen, UK
Richard Benjamins, iSOCO, Spain
Ryusuke Masuoka, Fujitsu Labs of America, MD
Sheila MacIlraith, University of Toronto, CA
Simon Thompson, BT Labs, UK
Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz, Germany
Steve Battle, HP Labs, UK
Steven Willmott, University of Catalunya, Spain
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