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 in the future.

URL: http://www.aois.org

Organizers: Brian Henderson-Sellers (brian@it.uts.edu.au), Michael Winikoff