The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: (1) AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management, (2) Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents, (3) Creative Intelligent Systems, (4) Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior, (5) Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, (6) Social Information Processing, (7) Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering, (8) Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science The goal of the AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management AAAI symposium was to investigate the various approaches and standards to represent business rules, business process management and the semantic web with respect to expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. The Semantic Scientific Knowledge Symposium was interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The Social Information Processing's goal was to investigate computational and analytic approaches that will enable users to harness the efforts of large numbers of other users to solve a variety of information processing problems, from discovering high-quality content to managing common resources. The purpose of the Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science symposium was to identify ways that topics in AI may be used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in AI-related curriculum at a number of educational levels.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) was pleased to present the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium Series, held Wednesday through Friday, March 26–28, 2008 at Stanford University, California. The titles of the eight symposia were as follows: (1) AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management, (2) Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents, (3) Creative Intelligent Systems, (4) Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior, (5) Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration, (6) Social Information Processing, (7) Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering, (8) Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science The goal of the AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management AAAI symposium was to investigate the various approaches and standards to represent business rules, business process management and the semantic web with respect to expressiveness and reasoning capabilities. The focus of the Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents AAAI symposium was the definition of architectures for intelligent theory-based agents, comprising languages, knowledge representation methodologies, reasoning algorithms, and control loops. The Creative Intelligent Systems Symposium included five major discussion sessions and a general poster session (in which all contributing papers were presented). The purpose of this symposium was to explore the synergies between creative cognition and intelligent systems. The goal of the Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior symposium was to examine fundamental issues in affect and personality in both biological and artificial agents, focusing on the roles of these factors in mediating social behavior. The Semantic Scientific Knowledge Symposium was interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The Social Information Processing's goal was to investigate computational and analytic approaches that will enable users to harness the efforts of large numbers of other users to solve a variety of information processing problems, from discovering high-quality content to managing common resources. The goal of the Symbiotic Relationships between the Semantic Web and Software Engineering symposium was to explore how the lessons learned by the knowledge-engineering community over the past three decades could be applied to the bold research agenda of current workers in semantic web technologies. The purpose of the Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science symposium was to identify ways that topics in AI may be used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in AI-related curriculum at a number of educational levels. Technical reports of the symposia were published by AAAI Press.

Our work is aimed at enabling a new style of virtual, distributed scientific research. We have designed, built, and deployed an interdisciplinary virtual observatory—an online service providing access to what appears to be an integrated collection of scientific data. The Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) is a production semantic web data framework providing access to observational data sets from fields spanning upper atmospheric terrestrial physics to solar physics. The observatory allows virtual access to a highly distributed and heterogeneous set of data that appears as if all resources are organized, stored, and retrieved or used in a common way. The end-user community includes scientists, students, and data providers. We will introduce interdisciplinary virtual observatories and their potential impact by describing our experiences with VSTO. We will also highlight some benefits of the embedded semantic web technology and also provide evaluation results after the first year of use.