Second International Bi-Conference Workshop on
AGENT-ORIENTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS (AOIS-2000)
 5-6 June 2000, Stockholm (Sweden) at CAiSE*00
30 July 2000, Austin (Texas, USA) at AAAI-2000

This bi-conference workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from the Information Systems and Agents communities who will be shaping the future of information systems engineering.

Topics of InterestWorkshop FormatSubmission Program Committee

Workshop Description

Agent-Orientation is emerging as a powerful new paradigm in computing.  Concepts and techniques from Artificial Intelligence could well be the foundations for the next generation of mainstream information systems.

Information systems have become the backbone of all kinds of organizations today.  In almost every sector -- manufacturing, education, health care, government, and businesses large and small -- information systems are relied upon for everyday work, communication, information gathering, and decision making.  Yet the inflexibilities in current technologies and methods have also resulted in poor performance, incompatibilties, and obstacles to change.  As many organizations are reinventing themselves to meet the challenges of global competition and e-commerce, there is increasing pressure to develop and deploy new technologies that are flexible, robust, and responsive to rapid and unexpected change.

The concept of "information" refers both to the mental state of agents (their knowledge/beliefs) and to the communication act of one agent informing another. The need to support and tightly integrate communication processes in information systems of the future is obvious. However, today's generic information system technologies, such as DBMS and ERP systems, do not support communication in a systematic fashion.

Agent concepts, which originated in artificial intelligence but which have further developed and evolved in many areas of computing, hold great promise for responding to the new realities of information systems.  While there are many conceptions of agents, most have embodied higher levels of representation, reasoning and communication involving knowledge/beliefs, perceptions (in the form of incoming messages), commitments, goals, and intentions.  On the one hand, the technical embodiment of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, transaction control, adaptive workflows, brokering and integration of disparate information sources, and automated communication processes.  On the other, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and flexible treatments of complex organizational processes.  The workshop will focus on how agent concepts and techniques will contribute to meeting information systems needs today and tomorrow.

Topics of Interest

Technical issues to be addressed include, but are not restricted to:
  • agent-oriented modeling and design methods
  • models and architectures for agent-oriented information systems
  • novel information system technologies based on software agents
  • agent-oriented requirements engineering
  • agents and knowledge management
  • agent-oriented approaches to data integration
  • agent-oriented transaction management
  • agent-based workflow modeling
  • agent-oriented extensions to database languages (such as SQL)
  • agent-oriented enterprise and business process modeling
  • agent communication languages for business communication
  • ontologies and agents
  • automated business-to-business interaction (including negotiation and contracting)
  • agents in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems

Workshop Format

To foster greater communication and interaction between the Information Systems and Agents communities, we are organizing the workshop as a bi-conference event.  It is intended to be a single "logical" event with two "physical" venues. It is hoped that this arrangement will encourage greater participation from, and more exchange between, both communities.

The technical program will include invited talks by leading experts in the field, one or more panel discussions, and contributed papers. Poster sessions are also being planned.  Authors of accepted papers who present their paper at one location will also be invited to present their papers as a poster in the other location.

To mitigate the geographic and temporal separation of the two parts of the workshop, electronic discussion will be strongly encouraged. Accepted papers will be posted on the workshop website.  There will be designated discussants for each paper. Discussants' comments will also be posted on the website.

Workshop Proceedings

The workshop proceedings of AOIS-1999 are going to be published by MIT Press. It is planned to publish also the proceedings of AOIS-2000.

Submission of Papers

To submit a regular paper describing either completed research or work in progress, authors should place it as a html, postscript or pdf file on a web server and send its URL along with the title, author names, affiliations, contact information and an abstract by email to one of the workshop chairs by 10 March 2000. Papers must be of reasonable size (not exceeding 15 pages). All submissions should explain what is the benefit from the proposed agent-oriented approach compared to more traditional approaches.

Position papers can be submitted at any time by email to gw@inf.fu-berlin.dein plain text or html. Please have a look at our  list of research questions.
 

 AOIS-2000 Workshop Chairs

Yves Lespérance
Department of Computer Science, York Univ. (CA)		 lesperan@cs.yorku.ca
Gerd Wagner
Institute of Informatics, Free Univ. Berlin (DE)		 gw@inf.fu-berlin.de
Eric Yu
Faculty of Information Studies, Univ. of Toronto (CA)		 eric.yu@utoronto.ca

AOIS-2000 Program Committee

H.-D. Burkhard (Humboldt Univ., DE)
I. Ferguson (The Capital Markets Co.)
T. Finin  (UMBC, USA)
A. Gal (Rutgers Univ., USA)
M. Huhns (Univ. S. Carolina, USA)
F. Dignum (Eindhoven Univ., NL)
M. Jarke (RWTH Aachen, DE)
G. Karakoulas (CIBC and Univ. Toronto, CA)
S. Kirn (Techn. Univ. Ilmenau, DE)
G. Lakemeyer (RWTH Aachen, DE)
Y. Lesperance (York Univ., CA)
F. Matthes (TU Harburg, DE)
J.P. Mueller (Siemens, DE)
J. Mylopoulos (Univ. Toronto, CA)
M.P. Papazoglou (Tilburg Univ., NL)
M. Schroeder (City Univ. London, UK)
M. Singh (North Carolina State Univ., USA)
K. Sycara (CMU, USA)
G. Wagner (Free Univ. Berlin, DE)
C. Woo (Univ. British Columbia, CA)
E. Yu (Univ. Toronto, CA)

This web page at  http://www.AOIS.org  was last updated on 3 January 2000.