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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 Workshop attendance Organising Committee
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February 27 March 14 April 16 April 21 April 26 |
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Workshop Description and motivations
Agent-Orientation is emerging as a powerful new paradigm in computing. Concepts and techniques from the agent paradigm could well be the foundations for the next generation of mainstream information systems, which we might term "active computing".
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 "active 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. 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 and 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:
The growth of interest in software agents and multi-agent systems has recently led to the development of new methodologies based on agent concepts. Modeling languages and methodologies (such as AAII, Gaia, MaSE, Message/UML, OPEN/Agent, PASSI, Prometheus, AORML and Tropos, 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 life-cycle.
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.
Submitters to this special track are encouraged to present their methodology using a case study from an information system application area. Such a case study is intended to be representative of the kinds of challenges faced by real-world information systems today and tomorrow, but also to be useful to show weaknesses and strengths of the presented methodology. After the workshop we would like to define a "challenge problem" taking contributions from all the participants and use it as a "benchmark example" for comparison in the future workshops.
Submitted papers must have
agent orientation as a central
feature. They could include (but are not limited to) papers that:
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 second part of the bi-conference event in 2004 will be held in July at the Third international joint conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004 – http://satchmo.cs.columbia.edu/aamas04/).
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 CAiSE2004 workshop. Authors for the special track are expected to present their papers at the CAiSE2004 workshop, and be discussants for other papers.
Post-Proceedings
The proceedings of the
previous workshop edition s being published by
Springer-Verlag
(P.
Giorgini, B. Henderson-Sellers, and M.
Winikoff
(Eds.) Agent-Oriented Information Systems - LNAI 3030), and there are similar plans for
AOIS-2004.
In addition to full length,
refereed papers, we are also seeking
position papers. These can be submitted by email to Palo Bresciani (bresciani@itc.it),
only in pdf format, following the instructions given above for the
regular submissions, except for the length.
A position paper should not exceed 2 pages. It must either:
The author must indicate in the accompanying email message under which of these three categories the 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/2004/CfPP.html
Workshop attendance is open to a limited number of participant. Therefore, attendance is allowed only by invitation. All the author of the papers accepted for presentation are automatically invited. Other participants will be invited on the basis of their full or position papers or upon request.
Organization
commitee
Co-chairs:
Paolo Bresciani
Institute for Scientific and Technological Research (IRST)
Trento, Italy
Email: bresciani@itc.it
Web page: http://sra.itc.it/people/bresciani/
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
Graham Low
School of Information Systems, Technology and Management
The University of New South Wales
Email: g.low@unsw.edu.au
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:
(to be confirmed)
This web
page at http://www.AOIS.org was
last updated on 3-May-2004.