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{{Paper
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|title=Overview of the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-52/oas01-overview.pdf
|volume=Vol-52
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==Overview of the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-52/oas01-overview.pdf
Overview of the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems
Stephen Cranefield Steven Willmott Tim Finin
Department of Information Laboratoire d’Intelligence Department of Computer
Science, University of Otago, Artificielle, Ecole Science and Electrical
Dunedin, New Zealand Polytechnique Fédéral de Engineering, University of
scranefield@infoscience.otago.ac.nz Lausanne, Lausanne, Maryland Baltimore County,
Switzerland USA
Steven.Willmott@epfl.ch finin@cs.umbc.edu
ABSTRACT gies and generic techniques such as logic-based and object-
The Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems took place at the oriented approaches and those based on Semantic Web mod-
5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Montreal, els.
Canada, 2001. This overview provides a summary of the aims and
Relationships between ontology modelling languages and ag-
outcomes of the workshop.
ent communication mechanisms: what are the dependencies
between (for example) the semantics of a communication
1. WORKSHOP AIMS language and what can be expressed in the ontology?
The potential benefits and technical difficulties of sharing infor-
mation between heterogeneous and distributed agents (both human Techniques for translation between different ontology repre-
and software) have led various research communities to develop sentation languages and coping with the evolution of ontolo-
techniques for explicitly modelling the concepts used within infor- gies.
mation sources and service-providing software to express their con-
Meta-modelling or other techniques for clarifying the rela-
tents and responses. Whether these conceptual models are called
tionship between ontologies and agents’ messaging and rea-
ontologies, schemas or data models, their use can facilitate the con-
soning systems.
struction of applications from loosely-coupled heterogeneous and
distributed components, and there is evidence of widespread re- Practical experience in building agent systems using explicit
search and commercial activity in this area: ontologies to support communication.
Requirements for ontology support in agent applications and
There are increasing efforts to use explicit representations of agent toolkits including support access to existing (e.g. Web-
ontologies for multi-agent systems that communicate at the based) ontology resources.
“knowledge level”.
Classifications identifying which approaches are most appro-
Research efforts such as DARPA’s CoABS Grid and Agent- priate for particular applications or communication require-
cities, as well as commercial developments like UDDI are ments.
working to link together large numbers of heterogeneous sys-
tems. 2. WORKSHOP SUMMARY
Initiatives such as ebXML and BizTalk are encouraging in- The workshop was held as a full-day workshop at the 5th Interna-
dustry to create a large amount of machine-readable ontolog- tional Conference on Autonomous Agents, Montreal, Canada on
ical data. 29 May, 2001. Nine full papers and fourteen short papers and po-
sition papers were accepted. The workshop programme included
Formally defined ontologies are a key component of the Se- four invited talks, eight long paper presentations and a final dis-
mantic Web community, which seeks to enhance the poten- cussion session, and 30 to 40 participants attended throughout the
tial for automated search and information integration across day.
the Web by including machine readable information in Web
resources. These proceedings include all accepted long and short papers and
the presentation slides for invited talks by Sheila McIlraith, Michael
Uschold and Natalya Noy. A fourth invited talk was presented
Against this background, the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent
by Dominic Greenwood of Fujitsu Laboratories of America on the
Systems was initiated in order to provide a forum for the discus-
topic “Ontologies: the FIPA perspective”.
sion and comparison of different approaches to the representation
of ontologies for agent systems, the practical considerations of de-
The recurring issues raised at the workshop included the following:
signing applications using these techniques and the infrastructural
support required for their effective use. In particular, the call for
papers listed the following topics of interest: How much of the domain semantics needs to be explicitly en-
coded? How much is implicit in the agent implementation?
Strengths and weaknesses of current ontology representa- How crucial and how practical is inference? What trade-offs
tion approaches for use with agents—both specific technolo- should be made between expressiveness and tractability?
What is the relationship between ontologies and agent com- Noriaki Izumi, Shizuoka University, Japan
munication and content languages? Matthias Klusch, Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche
Intelligenz (DFKI), Germany
How do we achieve “ontological criticial mass”? How do we Yannis Labrou, Powermarket.com, USA
generate enough ontologies and encourage their use? Will Frank McCabe, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, USA
they be consistent? Ryusuke Masuoka, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, USA
There is a need for industrial use cases to facilitate technol- Martin Purvis, University of Otago, New Zealand
ogy transfer. These should focus on realistic agent applica- Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
tions and not to try to solve the general information integra- The Netherlands
tion problem.
Additional Reviewers
Ontologies will change over time (particularly in a dynamic Michel Klein, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
agent world)—how will agents deal with this change? Jeen Broekstra, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Discussion in these areas and others was then summarised into
three points which outline today’s state of the art and captures what
are perhaps the immediate needs for the future:
There is convergence on the use (and perhaps adaptation) of
existing representation languages such as DAML+OIL and
UML. Researchers recognise that to encourage sharing of
ontologies, shared formalisms are important.
Shared ontologies are needed to build realistic and useful
agent systems. We need to find ways to publish, post and
host these more widely to begin the sharing process. Intially
it is expected there will emerge islands of shared terminology
and representation, but these may later become linked.
Reusable services and tools are emerging for the use of on-
tologies in an agent context. These include editors, agent
platform support, translation and hosting services. Such ini-
tiatives should become more visible and widely used to en-
courage reuse and make it easier for agent researchers to in-
clude ontologies in their systems.
3. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The workshop organisers gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Adele
Howe, the Workshop Chair for the Autonomous Agents 2001 con-
ference, and wish to thank the programme committee members,
other reviewers, and the workshop participants for making this work-
shop a success.
The following people were involved with running this workshop:
Organising Committee
Stephen Cranefield, University of Otago, New Zealand
Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
Steven Willmott, Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne,
Switzerland
Programme Committee
Federico Bergenti, Università Degli Studi di Parma, Italy
Monique Calisti, Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne,
Switzerland
Patricia Charlton, Motorola Research, France
Ulises Cortes, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Stefan Decker, Stanford University, USA
Stefan Haustein, Universität Dortmund, Germany
Pat Hayes, University of Western Florida, USA
James Hendler, DARPA/University of Maryland at College Park,
USA