The thirteenth AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was once again collocated with AAAI-2204, in San Jose, California. As in previous years, the robot events drew competitors from both academia and industry to showcase state-ofthe- art mobile robot software and systems in four organized events.

We propose the use of application semantics to enhance the process of semantic reconciliation. Application semantics involves those elements of business reasoning that affect the way concepts are presented to users: their layout, and so on. Existing matching algorithms use either syntactic means (such as term matching and domain matching) or model semantic means, the use of structural information that is provided by the specific data model to enhance the matching process. The novelty of our approach lies in proposing a class of matching techniques that takes advantage of ontological structures and application semantics.

A semantics-preserving exchange of information between two software applications requires mappings between logically equivalent concepts in the ontology of each application. The challenge of semantic integration is therefore equivalent to the problem of generating such mappings, determining that they are correct, and providing a vehicle for executing the mappings, thus translating terms from one ontology into another. This article presents an approach toward this goal using techniques that exploit the model-theoretic structures underlying ontologies. With these as inputs, semiautomated and automated components may be used to create mappings between ontologies and perform translations.

AAAI presented the AAAI-04 workshop program on July 25-26, 2004 in San Jose, California. This program included twelve workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were as follows: (1) Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining; (2) Agent Organizations: Theory and Practice; (3) Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data; (4) Challenges in Game AI; (5) Fielding Applications of Artificial Intelligence; (6) Forming and Maintaining Coalitions in Adaptive Multiagent Systems; (7) Intelligent Agent Architectures: Combining the Strengths of Software Engineering and Cognitive Systems; (8) Learning and Planning in Markov Processes -- Advances and Challenges; (9) Semantic Web Personalization; (10) Sensor Networks; (11) Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; and (12) Supervisory Control of Learning and Adaptive Systems.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented its 2004 Fall Symposium Series Friday through Sunday, October 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, adjacent to Washington, DC. The symposium series was preceded by a one-day AI funding seminar. The topics of the eight symposia in the 2004 Fall Symposia Series were: (1) Achieving Human-Level Intelligence through Integrated Systems and Research; (2) Artificial Multiagent Learning; (3) Compositional Connectionism in Cognitive Science; (4) Dialogue Systems for Health Communications; (5) The Intersection of Cognitive Science and Robotics: From Interfaces to Intelligence; (6) Making Pen-Based Interaction Intelligent and Natural; (7) Real- Life Reinforcement Learning; and (8) Style and Meaning in Language, Art, Music, and Design.

Sharing data across disparate sources requires solving many problems of semantic integration, such as matching ontologies or schemas, detecting duplicate tuples, reconciling inconsistent data values, modeling complex relations between concepts in different sources, and reasoning with semantic mappings. This issue of AI Magazine includes papers that discuss various methods on establishing mappings between ontology elements or data fragments. The collection includes papers that discuss semantic-integration issues in such contexts as data integration and web services. The issue also includes a brief survey of semantic-integration research in the database community.

The topic has been widely studied in the context of structured data, with problems being considered including ontology and schema matching, matching relational tuples, and reconciling inconsistent data values. This article studies a key challenge in semantic integration over text: identifying whether different mentions of real-world entities, such as "JFK" and "John Kennedy," within and across natural language text documents, actually represent the same concept. In its most general form, our model assumes (1) a joint distribution over entities (for example, a document that mentions "President Kennedy" is more likely to mention "Oswald" or "White House" than "Roger Clemens"), and (2) an "author" model that assumes that at least one mention of an entity in a document is easily identifiable and then generates other mentions via (3) an "appearance" model that governs how mentions are transformed from the "representative" mention. Finally, we discuss how our solution for mention matching in text can be potentially applied to matching relational tuples, as well as to linking entities across databases and text.

Although this is to be based on use of shared ontologies published on the semantic web, services produced and described by different developers may well use different, perhaps partly overlapping, sets of ontologies. Interoperability will depend on ontology mappings and architectures supporting the associated translation processes. This article reviews some of the processing assumptions that were made in the development of the semantic web service modeling ontology OWL-S and argues that, as a practical matter, the translation function cannot always be isolated in mediators. The translation for service discovery, service process model interpretation, task negotiation, service invocation, and response interpretation may then be distributed to various places in the architecture so that translation can be done in the specific goal-oriented informational contexts of the agents performing these processes.

Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at different autonomous, heterogeneous sources and providing the client with a unified, reconciled global view of the data. We resort to an expressive description logic, ALCQI, that fully captures classbased representation formalisms, and we show that query answering in data integration, as well as all other relevant reasoning tasks, is decidable. However, when we have to deal with large amounts of data, the high computational complexity in the size of the data makes the use of a fullfledged expressive description logic infeasible in practice. This leads us to consider DL-Lite, a specifically tailored restriction of ALCQI that ensures tractability of query answering in data integration while keeping enough expressive power to capture the most relevant features of class-based formalisms.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2004 Spring Symposium Series, Monday through Wednesday, March 22-24, at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia were (1) Accessible Hands-on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Education; (2) Architectures for Modeling Emotion: Cross-Disciplinary Foundations; (3) Bridging the Multiagent and Multirobotic Research Gap; (4) Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text: Theories and Applications; (5) Interaction between Humans and Autonomous Systems over Extended Operation; (6) Knowledge Representation and Ontologies for Autonomous Systems; (7) Language Learning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective; and (8) Semantic Web Services. Most symposia chairs elected to create AAAI technical reports of their symposium, which are available as paperbound reports or (for AAAI members) are downloadable on the AAAI members-only Web site. This report includes summaries of the eight symposia, written by the symposia chairs.