[DL] 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium on Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective

[Guido Boella]

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2005 AAAI Fall Symposium

Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective

II Call for papers

November 3-6, 2005, Hyatt Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia

The notion of role is ubiquitous not only in many areas of artificial 
intelligence, but also in many other areas of computer science, like 
programming languages, software engineering, coordination and databases, 
multiagent systems, computational linguistics and conceptual modelling, 
and also in other scientific fields, like formal ontology, sociology, 
cognitive science, organizational science and linguistics.

In sociology, on the one hand roles are often described as expected 
behavior of entities or agents, on the other hand roles are seen also as 
presentations of selves. In organizational science roles encompass more 
formal aspects such as rights and duties. Three different main 
viewpoints characterize research on roles:

   * roles as named places in relationships (especially in linguistics,
     databases and conceptual modelling)
   * roles as dynamic classification of entities (especially in
     programming languages and databases)
   * roles as instances to be adjoined to the entities which play the
     role (especially in ontologies, multiagent systems and programming
     languages).

Undisputed distinguishing features of roles seem to be their dependence 
on some other entities and their dynamic character (Sowa 1984). These 
properties contrast roles with the notion of natural types. Natural type 
seems to be essential to an entity: if an entity changes its natural 
type, it loses its identity; in Guarino (1992)'s terms, roles lack the 
rigidity which natural types possess. Masolo et al. (2004) elaborate the 
relational nature of roles, highlighting their definitional dependence 
on other concepts.

Discussions on roles are important not only to have a better 
understanding of theories using this notion, but also from the 
applicative point of view. E.g., integration of ontologies, programming 
languages, databases, simulation can benefit from the introduction of a 
well founded notion of role.

However, as, e.g., Steinmann (2000) witnesses, there is no common 
agreement yet about what roles are, which are their properties and how 
they can be modelled in a uniform way in the different areas. One likely 
reason is that roles are discussed in very different contexts, so that 
interested researchers have little opportunity to meet with each other. 
Even if there are events where roles are discussed, they always appear 
as a sub-topic within the framework of more general issues (like the 
AOSE workshop about agent oriented software engineering, or the recent 
CoOrg05 <http://boid.info/CoOrg05> workshop at Coordination05); hence, 
there are few venues for research integration.
With this symposium we propose to gather researchers working across the 
boundaries of their subfields to explore new formal and computational 
techniques and research methodologies for integrating research results. 
For this reason this symposium will provide time for discussion besides 
paper presentations.

Submissions

Researchers interested in making a presentation should submit a paper 
about theoretical or applicative issues (not to exceed 5,000 words). 
Other participants should submit either a position paper or a research 
abstract in order to be involved in the discussion. Submissions should 
be uploaded at http://roles05.di.unito.it/

Questions should be sent to Guido Boella (guido [at] di.unito.it).

Papers will be published in the symposium proceedings and the best 
papers of the symposium will be selected for publication on some renowed 
journal. Participants from all parts of the AI community as well as from 
other fields are encouraged. Instructions for authors can be found at 
website http://aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fall-symposia.html

Deadlines

   * May 3, 2005: Submission due to organizers
   * May 24, 2005: Notifications of acceptance sent by organizers
   * November 3-6, 2005: Symposium

Website

http://normas.di.unito.it/zope/roles05

<http://normas.di.unito.it/zope/events/roles05.pdf>

Organizing Committee

Guido Boella - Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita' di Torino
guido[at]di.unito.it

James Odell - Agentis, Ann Arbor (MI) USA
mailbox[at]jamesodell.com

Leendert van der Torre - CWI Amsterdam, Netherlands
torre[at]cwi.nl

Harko Verhagen - DSV, KTH/SU, Sweden
verhagen[at]dsv.su.se

References

N. Guarino. Concepts, attributes and arbitrary relations. Data and 
Knowledge Engineering (8), 1992.

C. Masolo and L. Vieu and E. Bottazzi and C. Catenacci and R. Ferrario 
and A. Gangemi and N. Guarino. Social roles and their descriptions. 
Procs. of KR04, 2004.

J.F. Sowa. Conceptual structures. Addison Wesley, NY. 1984.

F. Steimann. On the representation of roles in object-oriented and 
conceptual modelling. Data and Knowledge Engineering (35), 2000.
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