7th International Workshop on Business Agents and the Semantic Web (BASeWEB)

Budapest, Hungary, May 10 or 11, 2009

This workshop has been cancelled

A workshop held in conjunction with the Eighth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Description

With the advent of the World Wide Web and in an increasingly interconnected and networked world, more and more individuals and organizations choose to do business online. E-business increasingly uses agents and Web Services in a variety of contexts. Agents are semi-autonomous continuously running software entities that can conduct business on behalf of their users - organizations, or individuals buyers and sellers. Agents can use Web Services to provide new functionality or improved services to their users. For instance, agents can employ Web services to acquire, aggregate and compare product information on products and services from vendors.  Such Business Agents can profit from the machine-interpretable product and service descriptions provided by the Semantic Web. The main goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on E-business, Agents, Web Systems and the Semantic Web to explore novel uses of AI techniques in the Web and extending Web techniques by using AI. 

Topics of interest

All topics related to agents and e-business are welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Semantic Web approaches and architectures

• Semantic Web services

• Web agents for producers and consumers

• E-business architectures in the Semantic Web

• Business agent architectures 

• Knowledge management and e-business agents 

• Product and service codes/registries (e.g., UNSPSC/UDDI)

• Description logics and web ontologies

• Extended Horn logics and rule markup techniques (e.g., RuleML) 

• Application areas for rules (e.g., P3P, XACML, ebXML, DRM, etc.) 

• Belief logics and planning for multiple agents

• Rule Systems for Business Agents

• Negotiation (bargaining, auctions and trust)

• Inference engines: deduction and induction 

• Distributed deduction for the Semantic Web 

• Natural language interfaces for business agents

• Adaptive business agents

• Web service composition and choreography

• Machine learning for adaptive systems and user modeling

• Human-business agent interaction/cooperation

• Lessons learned from implemented systems

Workshop format

The workshop will mainly consist of presentations of submitted works, and a discussion on a particular topic (tbc) towards the end of the workshop.

Paper submissions

Original papers that address the above and other related topics are invited. Interested authors should follow the AAMAS guidelines to format their papers. The paper length is restricted to 8 pages. Papers should be sent by email to baseweb09@essex.ac.uk with the subject line “BASeWEB'09 paper submission”, no later than 9th February 2009. Submitted papers must be pdf files. If you have any queries, please email baseweb09@essex.ac.uk.

The papers will be reviewed by the program committee members. All accepted papers will be included into the workshop proceedings. The main criteria of this selection are originality, contribution, clarity, as well as to cover a broad variety of concepts and the contribution to the goals stated above. To facilitate a lively and interesting discussion, we will try to make all the papers available to the participants of the workshop before the workshop takes place. Workshop organizers can submit paper(s) subject to the following extra conditions: Papers will be submitted blind, i.e. given a double-blind review. None of the reviewers of those papers will be organizers of the workshop.

Post workshop activities

We intend to organize a special issue based on the BASeWEB'09 workshop submissions in the IOS Multi-agent and Grid Systems Journal. All authors will be invited to extend their papers for submission to this special issue. Revised papers from previous editions of this workshop have resulted in:

• A special issue of Computational Intelligence Vol. 18, No. 4. November 2002

• Two special sections of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Vol. 2,  No. 4, Winter 2003 and Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2004

• A special issue of Computational Intelligence Vol. 20, No. 4. November 2004

• A special issue in the International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering (ITWE) for extended and revised versions of papers presented at BASeWEB 2006, Volume 2, Number 4, October 2007

Important dates

Deadline for receipt of papers          February 9th, 2009
Notification to authors                      March 1st, 2009
Deadline for camera ready papers     March 15th, 2009
Workshop                                       May 10th or 11th, 2009

Organizers

Maria Fasli, University of Essex, UK

Ali Ghorbani, UNB, Fredericton, Canada

Scott Buffett, NRC, Fredericton, Canada

Bruce Spencer, NRC, Fredericton, Canada

Steering Committee

Maria Fasli, University of Essex, UK

Ali Ghorbani, UNB, Fredericton, Canada

Scott Buffett, NRC, Fredericton, Canada

Bruce Spencer, NRC, Fredericton, Canada

Said Tabet, Macgregor, Boston, USA

Harold Boley, NRC, Fredericton, Canada

Program Committee (incomplete)

Ansgar Bernardi, DFKI GmbH, Gernany

Ralph Deters, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

Hamada Ghenniwa, University of Western Ontario, Canada

Stephen Marsh, NRC Institute for Information Technology, Canada

Thomas Tran, University of Ottawa, Canada

Rainer Unland, University of Duisburg-Essen, ICB, Germany

• Call for Participation: Educational Uses of Multi-Agent Systems (EDUMAS), May 2009, Budapest, Hungary
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