Logic-based methods have a great potential as a toolbox for the development of information technology infrastructure which is able to provide and handle advances services. With the creation of the world wide web, and the advent of the internet as a communication backbone for connecting people, more and more data and information is becoming available; however, our current methods for managing this wealth of information, including searching, integrating, and updating, are still at an early stage. Quite some efforts will be needed to research the foundations of this as well practical methods. This concerns particular methods for well-defined information processing tasks, as well as the design of systems for intelligent information processing. Due to the distributed nature of the web, and the local autonomy of information sites, this requires in particular the design and development of societies of information agents, which need to cooperate for providing information services as desired by the end user.

The Dagstuhl Seminar 04171 (Logic Based Information Agents) brought together researchers and developers who are involved in the research for methods and the design of systems for agent-based information processing, and in particular for searching, fusing, and cleaning distributed data and knowledge, using tools and methods from computational logic.

The seminar provided a good opportunity for closer cooperation between the researchers from the areas of agent systems, semantic web, and P2P data integration. It helped to get a better understanding of the ways in which logic-based information agent systems may be built in the future, and helped to develop more efficient implementations of such systems.