This workshop addresses the challenges, opportunities, and practical applications of knowledge-based electronic markets (e-markets). By e-markets, we mean markets on the Web (or large inter-enterprise private networks) where buyers interact and transact with sellers. E-markets also include infrastructural/support and intermediary services and players, e.g., yellow pages, catalogs, shopping search, advertising, sales assistants, brokers/aggregators, infomediaries, reputation/trust, authentication, and payments. By knowledge-based, we mean using automated techniques for knowledge representation & reasoning, learning, and communication, e.g., in intelligent agents.

We particularly encourage submissions about practical applications and techniques, B2B (business-to-business commerce, e.g., supply chains), and XML. We also particularly encourage submissions about how to set up marketplaces, including developing and using ontologies to be shared by many participants in a given market for a particular set of goods/services. Higly pertinent as well are submissions that evaluate or advance relevant draft industry standards, e.g., for agent communication, contracts, XML-encoded information, and domain-specific ontologies (e.g., healthcare, electronics).

This workshop follows up on the highly successful workshop at AAAI-99 on AI for E-Commerce, which had a large number of papers and participants. The KBEM-2000 workshop will have a narrower and somewhat shifted focus: more on applications, more on interaction of buyers and sellers over the Web -- especially in XML, more on exploring the usefulness of core AI science and technology in the specific areas of knowledge representation & reasoning, learning, and (agent-ish) communication, more on the use of large knowledge bases and ontologies.

Electronic markets for the buying and selling of goods and services over the Web are a fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar segment of the world economy. Knowledge-based techniques for product recommendation, auctions, need identification, vendor selection, negotiation, agent communication, ontologies, business rules, and information integration are of rising interest, in part due to the rise of XML, and have started having practical impact on real Web e-markets. As more knowledge-based pieces of e-commerce have developed, issues are arising of how to put them together into overall functioning markets.

This area has potential lessons to be learned by the rest of AI about how and why research ideas become rapidly translated into commercial practice, e.g,. recommender systems. Recent significant progress in knowlege-based e-markets (EC) includes:

• practical shopping agents, including Web portal services, that use knowledge representation, decision analysis, machine learning, and information retrieval techniques.
• practical recommender services, e.g., e-storefronts that use collaborative filtering.
• practical data mining by sellers to learn customer buying patterns
• practical auction services
• XML-encoded domain ontologies and communication languages
• online product/service catalogs, e.g., techniques to aggregate catalogs
• agent communication languages, including: negotiation languages and protocols knowledge interchange

Format and Length of Workshop

Attendance and submissions

Workshop committee

• Tim Finin, (co-chair), University of Maryland Baltimore County, finin@cs.umbc.edu, phone: 410-455-3522, fax: 410-455-3969.
• Benjamin Grosof, (co-chair), IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Phone: 914-784-7783, Fax: 914-784-7455
• Yannis Labrou, University of Maryland Baltimore County, jklabrou@cs.umbc.edu.
• Leora Morgenstern, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, leora@watson.ibm.com

For more information