G. Wagner, Y. Lesperance, and E. Yu (Eds.)
Agent-Oriented Information Systems 2000
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 or 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.