Call for Papers Agent-based Technologies and applications for enterprise interOPerability ATOP 2006 (http://www.dfki.de/~kuf/atop/) Workshop to be held at the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2006) (http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/) Future University-Hakodate, Japan 8th May 2006 MOTIVATION Today's enterprises operate in a dynamic environment which is characterized by global outsourcing, shrinking product life-cycles, and unstable demand. To prosper in this environment, enterprises face a growing need to share information and to collaborate with each other at all levels of the value chain. As organizations are gradually transforming into "networked organizations", interoperability becomes the main challenge to realize the vision of seamless business interaction across organizational boundaries. Interoperability problems occur at different levels: at the business level (how organizations do business together, what needs to be described and how?), at the knowledge level (different formats, schemas, and ontologies), and at the level of the underlying information and communication technologies (ICT) and systems. Agent technologies provide a cross-cutting approach promising to enable intelligent and proactive automation, adaptive planning and execution, decentralized coordination, and semantic interoperability. The Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is another promising approach for the support of interoperability due to its promise of providing consistent models at different abstraction layers with well-defined mappings in between these layers. As a third thread of activity Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) try to reach interoperability, focusing upon, but not restricted to, the information and communication technology (ICT) level. The main contribution and goal of SOA is to achieve loose coupling among software entities representing business objects (processes, organizational units, etc.). Agents, MDA, and SOA provide complementary solution components to parts of the enterprise interoperability problems. It is unlikely that any of these approaches will succeed stand-alone in achieving the degree of interoperability that will be necessary to successfully construct, run, and optimize networked organizations. It is rather likely that a combination of these basic technologies will evolve in the next years to provide an appropriate basis for interoperability. Therefore the workshop aims at bringing together researchers and foster interaction and collaboration to work jointly on solutions to achieve interoperability. ATOP is set up as a workshop series which was first introduced to AAMAS in 2005. The workshop focuses on technologies that support interoperability in networked organizations, on successful applications of these technologies, and on lessons learned. The main goal is to discuss in how far agent technologies can support interoperability in this context and to compare current trends in the development of agent technologies with recent developments in service-oriented and model-driven system design with respect to their ability to solve interoperability problems. A publication of selected workshop papers is planned in Springer's LNAI series. WORKSHOP TOPICS Ideally submitted papers should deal with agent technologies in the context of: * simulation and validation of business systems * decision-support in value creation networks * enterprise and business process modeling * case studies of implemented interoperability solutions and systems * coordination and negotiation in distributed business networks * cross-organizational business processes * decentralized and peer-to-peer models and enactment of business processes * goal-driven and adaptive business process management * semantic annotations of business process descriptions * intelligent enterprise application integration * intelligent execution, monitoring, management, and optimization of business processes * service-oriented architectures and related topics like service choreography, orchestration, composition, brokering, and mediation * autonomic computing and adaptive autonomous architectures * model-driven architectures for business processes and systems * models and meta-models for agent-based systems * platform-independent models and their relation to agent models * model-to-model and model-to-text transformations * knowledge representations and ontologies in the context of (collaborative) business processes * agent communication languages and standards * self-organization and adaptation in the context of interoperable systems While discussing these topics, papers should make clear in how far the technologies or the proposed approach is able to foster interoperability of business systems. While the discussion of agent technologies is recommended, a proposal of new techniques or technologies to increase interoperability of business applications without direct reference to agent technologies is acceptable in exceptional cases. Still it is recommended that such work should be related to agent-oriented approaches if such approaches already exist. Researchers interested in submitting a paper to ATOP are encouraged to visit the Web page http://www.dfki.de/~kuf/atop/ and check the paper regarding the topics that were discussed during the ATOP 2005 workshop. Workshops specializing in some of the topics mentioned in the above list will be held at AAMAS 2006. Authors of papers that are dealing with such topics without much discussion of interoperability aspects are encouraged to submit their papers to the more specialized workshops. The workshop organizers will closely collaborate in the evaluation of the papers. Therefore, multiple submissions do not increase the chance of a paper to be accepted. SUBMISSION DETAILS Authors should submit original research papers (must not exceed 12 pages including all figures and tables) including an abstract of about 200 words or position papers (must not exceed 3 pages). In any case submission of preliminary abstracts some time before the official submission deadline is very much appreciated. All submissions must be sent electronically to Klaus.Fischer@dfki.de Acceptable formats are PDF and PostScript. It is planned to structure the workshops into invited talks, technical presentations and panel discussions. Formatting instructions can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html and should be strictly followed. The first page should include the full name and contact details of at least one author (email and full postal address). IMPORTANT DATES Submissions due February 1 2006 Notifications sent February 19 2006 Final papers due March 13 2006 Workshop May 8 2006 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Arne-Jorgen Berre, SINTEF, Norway Klaus Fischer, DFKI, Germany Joerg P. Mueller, Technische Universitaet Clausthal, Germany PROGRAM COMMITTEE Asier Azaceta, European Software Institute, Spain Sahin Albayrak, TU Berlin, Germany Bernhard Bauer, University Augsburg, Germany Gorka Benguria, European Software Institute, Spain Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University, Germany Amit Chopra, NC State University, USA Michael Georgeff, Monash University, Australia Timo Kahl, IWi, Germany David Kinny, Melbourne University, Australia Stefan Kirn, Hohenheim University, Germany Michele Missikoff, LEKS, Italy Eugenio Oliveira, University of Porto, Portugal Alan Powell, IBM UK Labs, England Omer Rana, Cardiff University, UK Ralph Ronnquist, Agent Oriented Software, Australia Rainer Ruggaber, SAP, Germany Carles Sierra, IIIA, Spain Donald Steiner, Quantum Leap Innovations, USA Joerg Ziemann, IWi, Germany Ingo Zinnikus, DFKI, Germany