IJCAI•01 Workshop on

E-Business &
the Intelligent Web

Seattle, USA • August 5 2001
 

Two trends appear likely to transform the web as we move further into the 21st century: (1) The e-business community is creating new infrastructures to support high-level business-to-business and business-to-consumer activities on the web. (2) The so-called "semantic web" movement is developing a range of proposals aimed at supporting intelligent information-seeking and information-management operations over the web.

In the first trend, the main foci are on defining a new generation of electronic data interchange protocols, mostly based on XML (prominent initiatives include BizTalk, eCo, OASIS, and RosettaNet) and on creating new kinds of e-business services such as agent-mediated b2b e-commerce, and knowledge-driven customer relationship management.

In the second trend, the emphasis is on enriching the web's data markup languages with knowledge representation features, to permit inference over the content of web pages (prominent initiatives include DAML, OIL, and RDF). Goals include the production of: internet-scale inference mechanisms, knowledge markup languages, and active information-seeking services.

Viewed from a high level, these trends seem well-matched: semantic processing of web content has the potential to widen the scope of e-business hugely, while e-business provides a major application for the intelligent web. However, a closer look suggests that the two trends may not be moving towards a harmonious marriage! It is possible that the e-business community may adopt standards ill-suited to supporting semantic processing, and it is equally possible that the intelligent web proposals may not meet the real needs of e-business.
 

The goal of this workshop is to bring together members of the e-business and intelligent web communities to consider the current state of the two fields, and identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the interaction between the two areas. Key questions that the workshop aims to address are:

Strengths: What are the promises for e-business of the emerging intelligent web technologies?

Weaknesses: Are there mismatches between the intelligent web proposals, and what's actually needed for e-business? Are there decisions being taken by the e-business community that may restrict exploitation of intelligent web technology?

Opportunities: What are key areas in which to invest effort? Where will be the biggest e-business pay-offs from using intelligent web technology?

Threats: How could failure to exploit intelligent web technology harm growth in e-business? How might the intelligent web miss the e-business boat?
 

The workshop is planned to include four kinds of session:

Invited talks: Prominent members of the e-business and intelligent web communities will set out their stalls.

Technical papers: Developers will present emerging e-business and intelligent web technologies.

Application papers: Practitioners will review lessons-learned in exploiting current e-business and intelligent web solutions.

Panel/discussion sessions: Key issues will be debated by panellists and the workshop participants as a whole.

One of the planned sessions will be a shared session between this workshop and the workshop on Ontologies and Information Sharing.

Submissions will be posted on this website in advance of the event. In most cases, presentations will be kept short, with speakers requested to highlight only key contributions, in order to set aside the maximum possible time for discussion and interaction.
 

Alun Preece (Co-chair / Primary Contact)
University of Aberdeen
Department of Computing Science
Aberdeen, Scotland, UK
Email apreece at csd dot abdn dot ac dot uk
Phone +44 1224 272291
Fax +44 1224 273422

Dan O'Leary (Co-chair)
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Email oleary@rcf-fs.usc.edu

Dieter Fensel
Division of Mathmatics & Computer Science
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email dieter@top.cs.vu.nl

Jim Hendler
Program Manager
DARPA/ISO
Arlington, VA, USA
Email jhendler@darpa.mil

Robert Plant
University of Miami
Department of Computer Information Systems
Coral Gables, FL, USA
Email rplant@exchange.sba.miami.edu

Rudi Studer
University of Karlsruhe
Institute AIFB
Karlsruhe, Germany
Email studer@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
 

Grigoris Antoniou, Griffith University, Australia

Richard Benjamins, isoco.com, Spain

Stefan Decker, Stanford University, USA

Benjamin Grosof, MIT, USA

Frank van Harmelen, AIdministrator, The Netherlands

Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Germany

Craig Knoblock, University of Southern California, USA

Yannis Labrou, UMBC, USA

Sergey Melnik, Stanford University, USA

Steve Minton, Fetch Technologies, USA

Luc Moreau, University of Southampton, UK

Bob O'Keefe, Brunel University, UK

Paul O'Brien, BT, UK

Tuomas Sandholm, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA

Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton, UK

Carles Sierra, IIIA-CSIC, Spain

Katia Sycara, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA

Mike Uschold, Boeing, USA