Business Agents and the
Semantic Web (BASeWEB’04)
May 16, 2004 – London,
Ontario, Canada
A workshop held in conjunction with
The Seventeenth Canadian
Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Theme
E-business increasingly uses Web Services or agents acting on behalf of human buyers and sellers. Such Business Agents can profit from the machine-interpretable product and service descriptions provided by the Semantic Web. Cross-fertilized techniques from AI (e.g., Intelligent Agents) and the Internet (e.g., the Semantic Web) are thus explored by numerous organizations world-wide, including W3C, OASIS, DARPA, NRC, IST, and INTAP. Web ontologies - consisting of taxonomies and/or rules - constitute the centerpiece of the new AI-Internet synthesis.
This workshop addresses researchers extending Web techniques by using AI methods, or transferring AI techniques to the Web in an attempt to create intelligent business agents. The current workshop builds on previous workshops such as BASeWEB'03 and '02, Novel E-Commerce Applications of Agents and Semantic Web-based E-Commerce and Rules Markup Languages.
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.
Panel
In addition, a panel session on "Machine Learning for Intelligent Business Agents: Successes and Challenges" will be held. This is an open session which will feature three or four leading researchers in the field. More details to follow.
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
· 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 commence with some short introductory remarks by the organizers, followed by an invited talk. The main part of the session will then be devoted to presentations of submitted works. The workshop will then conclude with a panel session on issues dealing with agents in machine learning, which will feature three or four of the leader researchers in the field.
Participation and Submissions
Participation in this workshop is by invitation only and invitees must be registered for the AI2003 conference. Also attendance is limited. Therefore, in case that a selection becomes necessary, we ask researchers that just want to attend the workshop without contributing a paper to send a short email to baseweb@unb.ca expressing their particular interest in the workshop.
Researchers interested in contributing a paper should send it to baseweb@unb.ca (in PDF format ONLY), up to 10 pages. Papers may already be prepared in one of the Elsevier formats.
The papers will be reviewed by the program committee members. All accepted papers will be included into the workshop notes and their authors will be invited to the workshop. The main criteria of this selection is 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. Any decisions regarding those papers will be in camera, not including the author.
After workshop activities
A special issue of Computational Intelligence is being planned to feature revised workshop papers. Only authors of accepted papers will be invited to resubmit their work 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 (2001 edition of the workshop called Novel E-Commerce Applications of Agents).
· Two special sections of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 2003 and Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2004 (BASeWEB’02).
· A special issue of Computational Intelligence (BASeWEB’03).
Important dates
Submissions/Requests for Participation: ***Extended deadline: Mar 7, 2004
Notifications of Acceptance/Invitations: Mar 17, 2004
Camera-ready paper due: April 9, 2004
Workshop: May 16, 2004
Harold Boley (NRC, Fredericton, Canada)
Scott Buffett (NRC, Fredericton, Canada)
Ali Ghorbani (UNB, Fredericton, Canada)
Bruce Spencer (NRC, Fredericton, Canada)
Said Tabet (Macgregor, Boston, USA)
Machine Learning Panel Organizer
Daniel Silver (Acadia University, Canada)
Program Committee
David Ash
Stephen Marsh
Hamada Ghenniwa
Gord McCalla
Xiaolin Niu
Sandy Liu
Elhadi Shakshuki
Danny Silver
Michael Sintek
Julita Vassileva
Gerd Wagner