Manuel Kolp - Böcker

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the workshops held in conjunction with ER 2005, the 24th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling. The objective of these workshops was to extend the spectrum of the main conferencebygivingparticipantsanopportunitytopresentanddiscussemerging hot topics related to conceptual modeling and to add new perspectives to this key mechanism for understanding and representing organizations, including the new “virtual” e-environments and the information systems that support them. To meet this objective, we selected 5 workshops: – AOIS 2005: 7th International Bi-conference Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems – BP-UML 2005: 1st International Workshop on Best Practices of UML – CoMoGIS 2005: 2nd International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling for Geographic Information Systems – eCOMO 2005: 6th International Workshop on Conceptual Modeling - proaches for E-business – QoIS 2005: 1st International Workshop on Quality of Information Systems These 5 workshops attracted 18, 27, 31, 9, and 17 papers, respectively. F- lowing the ER workshopphilosophy, program committees selected contributions on the basis of strong peer reviews in order to maintain a high standard for accepted papers. The committees accepted 8, 9, 12, 4, and 7 papers, for acc- tance ratesof 44%,33%,39%,44%, and 41%,respectively. In total, 40 workshop papers were selected out of 102 submissions with a weighted averageacceptance rate of 40%.

Information systems underpin today’s business and entertainment. The means by which these information systems have been developed has changed over the years. Although the current paradigm is to use object-oriented concepts, a new set of concepts, focussed on agent technology, is starting to be evaluated. Agents offer higher level abstractions (than objects) for the conceptualization, design and implementation of information systems. Agents have autonomy, can reason and can coordinate within societies of agents. The AOIS series of workshops explores the potential for facilitating the increased usage of agent technology in the creation of information systems in the widest sense. In 2005, two AOIS workshops were held internationally. The first was affiliated with the AAMAS 2005 meeting in July in Utrecht in The Netherlands and chaired by Henderson-Sellers and Winikoff and the second with ER 2005 in November in Klagenfurt in Austria and chaired by Kolp and Bresciani. The best papers from these meetings were identified and authors invited to revise and possibly extend their papers in the light of reviewers’ comments and feedback at the workshop. We have grouped these papers loosely under four headings: Agent behavior, communications and reasoning; Methodologies and ontologies; Agent-oriented software engineering; and Applications. These categories fairly represent the breadth of current AOIS research as well as encompassing the papers presented at the two AOIS workshops. We trust you will find the content of these selected and revised papers to be of interest and utility.