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2005 AAAI Fall Symposium
Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective
II Call for papers
November 3-6, 2005, Hyatt Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia
The notion of role is ubiquitous not only in many areas of artificial intelligence, but also in many other areas of computer science, like programming languages, software engineering, coordination and databases, multiagent systems, computational linguistics and conceptual modelling, and also in other scientific fields, like formal ontology, sociology, cognitive science, organizational science and linguistics.
In sociology, on the one hand roles are often described as expected behavior of entities or agents, on the other hand roles are seen also as presentations of selves. In organizational science roles encompass more formal aspects such as rights and duties. Three different main viewpoints characterize research on roles:
* roles as named places in relationships (especially in linguistics,
databases and conceptual modelling)
* roles as dynamic classification of entities (especially in
programming languages and databases)
* roles as instances to be adjoined to the entities which play the
role (especially in ontologies, multiagent systems and programming
languages).Undisputed distinguishing features of roles seem to be their dependence on some other entities and their dynamic character (Sowa 1984). These properties contrast roles with the notion of natural types. Natural type seems to be essential to an entity: if an entity changes its natural type, it loses its identity; in Guarino (1992)'s terms, roles lack the rigidity which natural types possess. Masolo et al. (2004) elaborate the relational nature of roles, highlighting their definitional dependence on other concepts.
Discussions on roles are important not only to have a better understanding of theories using this notion, but also from the applicative point of view. E.g., integration of ontologies, programming languages, databases, simulation can benefit from the introduction of a well founded notion of role.
However, as, e.g., Steinmann (2000) witnesses, there is no common agreement yet about what roles are, which are their properties and how they can be modelled in a uniform way in the different areas. One likely reason is that roles are discussed in very different contexts, so that interested researchers have little opportunity to meet with each other. Even if there are events where roles are discussed, they always appear as a sub-topic within the framework of more general issues (like the AOSE workshop about agent oriented software engineering, or the recent CoOrg05 <http://boid.info/CoOrg05> workshop at Coordination05); hence, there are few venues for research integration.
With this symposium we propose to gather researchers working across the boundaries of their subfields to explore new formal and computational techniques and research methodologies for integrating research results. For this reason this symposium will provide time for discussion besides paper presentations.
Submissions
Researchers interested in making a presentation should submit a paper about theoretical or applicative issues (not to exceed 5,000 words). Other participants should submit either a position paper or a research abstract in order to be involved in the discussion. Submissions should be uploaded at http://roles05.di.unito.it/
Questions should be sent to Guido Boella (guido [at] di.unito.it).
Papers will be published in the symposium proceedings and the best papers of the symposium will be selected for publication on some renowed journal. Participants from all parts of the AI community as well as from other fields are encouraged. Instructions for authors can be found at website http://aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fall-symposia.html
Deadlines
* May 3, 2005: Submission due to organizers * May 24, 2005: Notifications of acceptance sent by organizers * November 3-6, 2005: Symposium
Website
http://normas.di.unito.it/zope/roles05
<http://normas.di.unito.it/zope/events/roles05.pdf>
Organizing Committee
Guido Boella - Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita' di Torino guido[at]di.unito.it
James Odell - Agentis, Ann Arbor (MI) USA mailbox[at]jamesodell.com
Leendert van der Torre - CWI Amsterdam, Netherlands torre[at]cwi.nl
Harko Verhagen - DSV, KTH/SU, Sweden verhagen[at]dsv.su.se
References
N. Guarino. Concepts, attributes and arbitrary relations. Data and Knowledge Engineering (8), 1992.
C. Masolo and L. Vieu and E. Bottazzi and C. Catenacci and R. Ferrario and A. Gangemi and N. Guarino. Social roles and their descriptions. Procs. of KR04, 2004.
J.F. Sowa. Conceptual structures. Addison Wesley, NY. 1984.
F. Steimann. On the representation of roles in object-oriented and conceptual modelling. Data and Knowledge Engineering (35), 2000.
roles05.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
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