Roles'07

Roles are a truly ubiquitous notion: like classes, objects and relationships they pervade the vocabulary of every science that deals with the nature of things and how those things relate — so fundamental, the call argues, that they deserve the status of an ontological primitive. But the definition of roles depends on the definition of relationships, and object technology pushed relationships out of focus in favour of attributes and references, which are asymmetric and so leave a role without its counter-role. In multi-agent systems the relational nature of roles is already acknowledged, through interaction and communication protocols, yet without convergence on a single definition. The workshop gathered researchers from these different disciplines to converge on ontologically founded proposals applicable to programming and agent languages. Its predecessor, "Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective" (Roles'05), was held at the AAAI 2005 Fall Symposium.