Tutorials

As a further chance for its attendants, CEEMAS'05 has put together a very rich and stimulating tutorial program: The hottest agent-related topics presented by some of the most active and prominent agent researchers in Europe. The tutorial will cover from the very basics of each topic to the most advanced issues, targeting both students interested in agent research, and experienced practitioners and researchers from other agent-related fields.

All tutorials will be half-day, and will run on the morning of September 15.

All registered attendants will be provided with the printouts of the tutorial slides, and possibly with some related articles and material according to the lecturers indications.

List of tutorials:

Agents and the Semantic Web
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
Self-Organisation and Emergence: Mechanisms and Applications

Agents and the Semantic Web

Terry Payne & Valentina Tamma

Abstract

The Semantic Web presents a different perspective in the way distributed knowledge can be viewed, in terms of creation, consumption, dissemination, and management. Concepts can be defined within extensible, open ontologies published using standard protocols with instances and properties being asserted at arbitrary locations across the internet. Multi-Agent Systems, in contrast, provide methodologies for consuming, processing, creating and disseminating both information and knowledge within a distributed framework. Moreover, the construction and co-ordination of heterogeneous agent communities itself requires complex management of data; the interpretation of which may be ambiguous without semantic structure or reasoning.

This tutorial aims to provide an overview of the theory and the technology underlying the overlap between Agents and the Semantic Web as well as examples of their combined use to support applications in areas such as Semantic Web services and the Semantic Grid.

Syllabus

• Introduction: aim of the tutorial, topics, literature

• The Semantic Web

• introduction, history, motivations, purposes, such as the SW as a glue for different components for distributed knowledge management

• origin and State of the art

• previous projects or research efforts that have influenced the current state of the art, such as the knowledge sharing initiative, CoABS, etc

• open agent architectures

• service oriented agent architectures…

• Semantic Web architecture and its components

• ontologies

• reasoners and reasoning

• overview & DLs

• DIG API

• tools such as Pellet, Racer & Fact

• web technologies (RDF, OWL, namespaces etc)

• services

• Ontologies

• Motivation: Semantic interoperability and integration

• Role played in multi agent systems: domain ontologies, PSMs, ontologies and ACLs

• Standards for representing ontologies RDFs and OWL

• Need for rules: overview of SWRL and Rule ML

• Ontology alignment and merging. Mapping and negotiation techniques

• Some ontology engineering notions: what is a good ontology

• Agents

• Why are agent important (as opposed to p2p systems, for instance)

• Autonomy, proactiveness, failure and recovery mechanisms for SemWeb architectures

• Issues with open, distributed architectures

• Tools for supporting the use of SW content in agent architectures: Jena, Sesame

• Query languages for SW content: RDQL, SeRQL, SPRQL

• Semantics in Agent Communication Languages, Interaction Protocols and Electronic Institutions

• Applications

• (Semantic) Web services:

• Semantic description, discovery, and selection of services, orchestrations and choreographies

• Knowledge Representation for Semantic Web Services: OWL-S and WSMO

• Search and retrieval of digital content

• Semantic Grid applications

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Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

Massimo Cossentino
cossentino@pa.icar.cnr.it

Franco Zambonelli
franco.zambonelli@unimore.it

Abstract

The basic principles and lessons of software, knowledge, and distributed systems engineering, as well as the same scientific rigour pervading these research areas, have to be applied to the development and deployment of multiagent systems. At present, the majority of existing agent applications are developed in an ad-hoc fashion: little or no rigorous design methodology, limited specification of the requirements, ad-hoc design of agents and of multi-agent system as a whole, and little attention to non-functional requirements such as mobility, scalability, performance issues, standards. This is indeed a limitation for the widespread appliance of any new software technology. And, of course, it can be a strong limitation for agent-based computing too. Moreover, outside the agent community, there is still no widespread acceptance of agent-based computing as a new paradigm. Many people – both from academia and from industry – still think that agents are nothing but grown-up objects, renewed with a nice, publication-appealing, name.

Although the raising of some scepticism is intrinsic with the introduction of any new technology, we feel that this problem is actually exacerbated within the agent community by the lack of a clear and unambiguous terminology, of a clean set of abstractions, and, even more important, of a full understanding of the commonalties and differences between the agent paradigm and more traditional (i.e., object-based and component based) paradigm for software development, and of the associated advantages and drawbacks.

Clarifying what makes agent-based approach to the development of complex software systems different from traditional component-based and object-based approaches, and developing a discipline of agent-oriented software development accordingly, are thus necessary goals to be achieved for making agents accepted outside the agent community.

Program of the Tutorial (4 hours)

1. Basic concepts of software engineering (1 hour):

a. Why do we need software engineering?

b. The software lifecycle.

c. Basic components of the software lifecycle.

2. Agent-oriented software engineering (1/2 hour):

a. Why do we need agent-oriented software engineering?

b. Agents at different levels of abstractions:

i. The knowledge level;

ii. The social level.

c. Analysis:

i. What is analysis at the knowledge level?

ii. What is analysis at the social level?

d. Design:

i. What is design at the knowledge level?

ii. What is design at the social level?

e. Implementation issues:

i. Platforms and languages

ii. The role of standards

3. Overview of two methodologies for agent-oriented software engineering (1 1/2 hours):

a. GAIA: analysis and design;

b. PASSI: analysis and design.

4. Composition of a new methodology: The Agent-Oriented Method Engineering approach (1/2 hour)

a. Fundamentals of Method Engineering (in the Object-oriented context)

b. What is different in Agent-oriented Method Engineering

5. Conclusions (1/2 hour):

a. When do we need to use agent-oriented software engineering?

b. What are the most important challenges for agent-oriented software engineering?

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Self-Organisation and Emergence: Mechanisms and Applications

Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo
Giovanna.Dimarzo@cui.unige.ch

Anthony Karageorgos
karageorgos@computer.org

Marie-Pierre Gleizes
Marie-Pierre.Gleizes@irit.fr

Abstract

To cope with the inherent dynamism in today's application requirements and environments, systems need to autonomously change their structure and functionality on run-time. Dynamic behavioural changes are referred to with the term self-organisation, while new behaviours resulting from these changes are termed emergent.

The emphasis of this tutorial is three-fold. Firstly, it will provide an introduction to basic important concepts related to self-organisation and emergence. Secondly, it will review self-organising mechanisms, relevant middleware computing infrastructures, as well as methodologies and CASE tools for design and development. Finally, this tutorial will present a number of representative real-world applications.

Intended audience

Given the introductory nature of this tutorial, the first target of this tutorial are students.

Program of the courses (4 hours)

I. Introduction to Basic Concepts

1. Examples of emergence and of self-organized systems

2. Definition of self-organisation and properties of self-organising systems

3. Definition of the emergence and its properties

4. Self-organisation and emergence in natural systems

II. Self-Organisation Mechanisms

1. Naturally inspired mechanisms

1.1 Bio-Inspired mechanisms

1.2 Socially-Inspired mechanisms

2. Non-Naturally inspired mechanisms

2.1 Self-Assembly

2.2 Self-Management

2.3 Tag-Based Model

2.4 Trust

III. Self-Organisation Infrastructures

1. Swarm Based Coordination

2. Field Based Coordination

IV. Self-Organisation Methodologies and Tools

1. Methodologies

2. Tools

V. Self-Organising Applications

1. Networking (wired, wireless, security)

2. Manufacturing Control

3. P2P Systems

4. Business ? e-commerce - marketing

5. CSCW

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