Fifth International Bi-Conference Workshop on 
AGENT-ORIENTED INFORMATION SYSTEMS (AOIS-2003)
  13 October 2003, Chicago, Illinois, at ER'03


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.

Important Dates    Topics of Interest   Workshop Format   Special Track   Submission  Organising Committee


Important dates:


Workshop Description and motivations

Agent-Orientation is emerging as a powerful new paradigm in computing. Concepts and techniques from the agents paradigm 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, incompatibilities, 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.    

Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of information systems. They offer higher level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, intentions, etc. all of which need conceptual modelling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation 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 hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and flexible treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more effective requirements analysis, and architectural/detailed design. The workshop will focus on how agent concepts and techniques will contribute to meeting information systems needs today and tomorrow.

The workshop encourages submissions on all topics related to AOIS, including (but not limited to) the following:      


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 first part of the bi-conference event in 2003 will be held in July at the Second international joint conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS 2003 -- http://www.aamas-conference.org/). 

The technical program will include invited talks by leading experts in the field, contributed papers, and poster sessions. 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.   

All papers submitted to the special track will be discussed by designated discussants and panels at the ER2003 workshop. Authors for the special track are expected to present their papers at the ER2003 workshop, and be discussants for other papers.  Activities associated with the special track will also be organized at AAMAS 2003.
 
Papers will be published as part of the ER2003 Workshop volume, planned for publication by Springer in their LNCS series.



Special Track:   (at AOIS@ AAMAS2003)
Agent-Oriented Methodologies -- Commonalities and Distinctions


The growth of interest in software agents and multi-agent systems has recently led to the development of new methodologies based on agent concepts.  Methodologies and associated notations (such as, Gaia, AAII, AOR, MaSE, Message/UML, AUML, OPEN/Agent, Tropos, PASSI and Prometheus among others) have become  the focal point of attention in the emerging area of agent-oriented  software engineering. These methodologies propose different approaches  in using agent concepts and techniques at various stages during the  software development lifecycle. 
 
To promote deeper understanding among and to foster synergy across research efforts in the various methodologies, this special track solicits research contributions that will identify, analyze, and illustrate the commonalities and distinctions across different methodologies.  Methodologies may differ in their objectives and underlying premises, the way they deal with issues such as openness, uncertainty, security, and autonomy, the extent of coverage over the different phases of software engineering, the way they stress the evolution, maintenance, and other non-functional qualities, and eventually with respect to the tools and technologies that can support them. Methodologies may also differ in generality, some focusing on specialized application domains, or specific implementation technologies.  A clarification of the similarities and differences among methodologies is needed to guide the practitioner in choosing which methodology to adopt for what applications and circumstances.  A clearer understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies, their compatibilities and divergences, will also be crucial for further advancements in the development and potential convergence of methodologies.

Submitted papers must have agent orientation as a central feature. They could include (but are not limited to) papers that: 


Submission of Papers

To submit a regular paper as a postscript or pdf file, authors should either send it by  email (or place it on a web server and send its URL) to  paolo.giorgini@dit.unitn.it. A separate message with  the title, author names, affiliations, contact information and an abstract has to be sent. Papers must be at most 12 pages.

Submitted papers must be formatted using the Springer LNCS style. Templates (llncs.cls, llncs.sty, or sv-lncs.dot) are available at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

Papers for the special track (Agent-Oriented Methodologies -- Commonalities and Distinctions) should be clearly identified.

Position Papers

In addition to full length, refereed papers, we are also seeking position papers.  These can be submitted by email to pgiorgini@science.unitn.it in ps or
pdf format.

Your position paper should not exceed 2 pages. It must either
  1. discuss a specific problem, or
  2. attack a specific position, or
  3. articulate a specific technology forecast.

You must indicate under which of these three categories your position paper falls. A problem discussion must begin with a section called Problem Statement and must conclude with a section called Research Questions. An attack must first describe the position to be attacked in neutral language
before it presents reasons why it should be rejected. A technology forecast should consist of one or more forecast statements with additional explanation. 

Please have a look at our  list of research questions at http://www.aois.org/CfPP.html



Organization commitee

Co-chairs:

Paolo Giorgini
Department of Information and Communication Technology
University of Trento, Italy
Email: paolo.giorgini@dit.unitn.it
Web page: http://www.dit.unitn.it/~pgiorgio

Brian Henderson-Sellers
Faculty of Information Technology
University of Technology, Sydney
Email: brian@it.uts.edu.au
Web page: http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~brian



Steering Committee:

Yves Lesperance
Department of Computer Science
York University, Canada
Email:lesperan@cs.yorku.ca
Web page: http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~lesperan

Gerd Wagner
Department of Information & Technology,
Eindhonven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Email: G.Wagner@tm.tue.nl
Web page: http://tmitwww.tm.tue.nl/staff/gwagner

Eric Yu
Faculty of information Studies,
University of Toronto, Canada
Email: eric.yu@utoronto.ca
Web page: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~eric


Program Committee:  



This web page at  http://www.AOIS.org  was last updated on 28-Jan-2003.