]> 2003-07-01T00:00:00-05:00 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.

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. ]]> 1157 6878036