Information agent technology is one of the major key technologies for the Internet and worldwide Web. An information agent is a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple, heterogeneous and distributed information sources, pro-actively searches for and maintains relevant information on behalf of its human users or other agents preferably just-in-time. In other words, it is managing and overcoming the difficulties associated with information overload in the open and exponentially growing Internet and Web. One key challenge of developing advanced information systems is to balance the autonomy of networked data and knowledge sources with the potential payoff of leveraging them by the appropriate use of intelligent information agents. Therefore, the special focus of this workshop series is on the perspectives, design, and implementation of intelligent information agents which are able to collaborate in open, networked data and information environments for and providing added value to a variety of applications in different domains. The development of such agents requires expertise from different research disciplines such as AI, databases, knowledge representation and reasoning, distributed systems, information retrieval, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Keeping with its tradition all topics in the research area of intelligent and collaborating information agents are covered by the CIA-2003 workshop. Topics include but are not limited to

• Systems and Applications of Information Agents
• Architectures of information agents.
• Prototypes and fielded systems of information agents.
• Recommender systems; collaborative cases.
• Issues of programming information agents.
• Advanced Theories of Collaboration
• Social filtering, cooperative search, group forming and negotiation, etc.
• Cooperation in real-time and open environments.
• Self-organising information agent systems.
• Capability-based mediation between information agents.
• Collaboration in peer-to-peer networks.
• Agent-Based Knowledge Discovery
• Knowledge discovery by (systems of) information agents; collaborative cases.
• Agent-based distributed data mining.
• Distributed information retrieval and Web mining.
• Information Agents for the Semantic Web
• Agent-based service discovery and composition.
• Agent-based service matchmaking and brokering in the Semantic Web.
• Agent-based distributed ontology learning.
• Mobile Information Agents
• Mobile information agents for distributed information retrieval: Prototypes, experiments, case studies, and experiences.
• Architectures, environments and languages for engineering mobile information agents.
• Cooperative mobile information agents.
• Information Agents and Ubiquitous Computing
• Information agents in ubicomp environments: Applications, surveys; collaborative cases.
• Rational Information Agents for E-Business
• Models of economic rationality and trust to be applied to information agents for e-business.
• Issues of privacy of communication, data security, and jurisdiction for agent-mediated trading.
• Coalition and team formation algorithms.
• Intelligent Interfaces for Information Agents
• Human-agent interaction for (systems of) information agents.
• Life-like characters and avatars.
• Information agents for/applied to digital cities.
• Advanced, personalized 3-d visualizations of information spaces.
• Agent-based Web usage mining
• Personalisation; collaborative cases.
• Adaptive Information Agents
• Adaptive information retrieval; collaborative cases.
• Reasoning with imperfect information: collaborative cases.
• Multi-strategy and meta-learning for cooperative information agents.

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