Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies

The 6th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2008) will be held as part of the workshop programme of the 8th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2008) at Estoril, Portugal, in May 2008.

DALT is a well-established forum for researchers interested in sharing their experiences in combining declarative and formal approaches with engineering and technology aspects of agents and multiagent systems. Building complex agent systems calls for models and technologies that ensure predictability, allow for the verification of properties, and guarantee flexibility. Developing technologies that can satisfy these requirements still poses an important and difficult challenge. Here, declarative approaches have the potential of offering solutions satisfying the needs for both specifying and developing multiagent systems. Moreover, they are gaining more and more attention in important application areas such as the semantic web, service-oriented computing, security, and electronic contracting. For instance, some convergence points between the areas of formal methods for dealing with web services and formal methods for agents are emerging and gaining more and more attention.

Following the success of DALT 2003 in Melbourne, DALT 2004 in New York, DALT 2005 in Utrecht, DALT 2006 in Hakodate, and DALT 2007 in Honolulu. DALT will again aim at providing a discussion forum to both (i) support the transfer of declarative paradigms and techniques to the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners, and (ii) to bring the issue of designing complex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative languages and technologies.

The post-proceedings of DALT 2003 (LNAI 2990), DALT 2004 (LNAI 3476), DALT 2005 (LNAI 3904), DALT 2006 (LNAI 4327), DALT 2007 (LNAI 4897) have been published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.