Proceedings of the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems (OAS'03

There is a growing interest in the use of ontologies in agent systems as a means to facilitate interoperability among diverse software components, in particular, where interoperability is achieved through the explicit modelling of the intended meaning of the concepts used in the interaction between diverse information sources, software components and/or service-providing software. The problems arising from the creation, maintenance, use and sharing of such semantic descriptions are perceived as critical to future commercial and non-commercial information networks, and are being highlighted by a number of recent large-scale initiatives to create open environments that support the interaction of many diverse systems (e.g. Agentcities, Grid computing, the Semantic Web and Web Services). A common thread across these initiatives is the need to support the synergy between ontology and agent technology, and increasingly, the multi-agent systems and ontology research communities are seeking to work together to solve common problems. <p> This workshop is the third in a series of workshops on Ontologies and Agent Systems (the previous workshops were held at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents 2001 in Montreal, Canada and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002 in Bologna, Italy). It aims to provide a forum to foster discussion on the issues involved in using ontologies to support interactions between software agents. Emphasis will be on the discussion of ontologies with respect to the practical impact they have on agent architecture and application design. <p> A new initiative this year was the introduction of a workshop challenge problem to discuss the design and (preferably) an implementation of a multi-agent system in the domain of travel booking information and services, based on a domain description previously developed for an ontology tool assessment exercise organised by the EU OntoWeb project’s SIG on enterprise-standard ontology environments. The details of the challenge problem can be found on the OAS’03 workshop Web page at http://oas.otago.ac.nz/OAS2003/. Although there were only two papers that responded to the challenge problem, we hope that the challenge will provide a focus for wider discussion throughout the workshop of the issues of building agent systems that use ontologies.