The biennial DEON conferences are designed to promote interdisciplinary cooperation amongst scholars interested in linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts and normative systems with computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, organisation theory and law. In addition to these general themes, DEON2008 will encourage a special focus on the topic Security and Trust.

There have been eight previous DEON conferences: Amsterdam, December 1991; Oslo, January 1994; Sesimbra, January 1996; Bologna, January 1998; Toulouse, January 2000; London, May 2002; Madeira, May 2004; Utrecht, July 2006. Selected papers from each of these conferences have been published internationally.
General themes

The Program Committee invites papers concerned with the following topics:

* the logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, the logic of action, and other related areas of logic
* the formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems
* the formal representation of legal knowledge
* the formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of rights, authorisation, delegation, power, responsibility and liability
* the formal specification of normative systems for the management of bureaucratic processes in public or private administration
* applications of normative logic to the specification of database integrity constraints
* normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and multi-agent decision making

Specific Security and Trust themes

DEON2008 has a special focus on logical approaches to deontic notions in computer science in security and trust, encompassing applications in e-commerce as well as traditional areas of computer security. Topics of interest in this special theme include, but are not limited to:

* digital rights management
* electronic contracts, including:
o service level agreements
o digital media licenses
* authorization
* access control
* security policies
* privacy policies
* business processes
* regulatory compliance

We welcome both theoretical work (formal models, representations, specifications, logics, verification) and implementation-oriented work (architectures, programming languages, design models, simulations, prototype systems) on these specific topics.
Submission details

Authors are invited to submit an original, previously unpublished, research paper pertaining to any of these topics. The paper should be in English, and should be no longer than 15 pages, or approximately 7500 words. The first page should contain the full name and contact information for at least one of the authors, and it should contain an abstract of no more than ten lines. Authors should submit their papers electronically, in either .pdf or .ps format.

Authors should consult the instructions on the website for submitting their papers electronically. (Anyone who is unable to send the paper electronically and wishes to submit hard copies should inquire for details from one of the program co-chairs at the addresses given below.) Authors are especially encouraged to use the Springer LNCS styles if possible; these are available at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. The deadline for submission is 11 January 2008.
Timetable

* 11 January 2008: submission deadline
* 22 February 2008: notification of acceptance
* 21 March 2008: deadline for final, camera-ready versions
* 15 July 2008: NORMAS 2008 workshop
* 16â??18 July 2008: DEON'08 conference

Publication

Copies of the workshop proceedings, will be provided to all participants. The proceedings will be published with Springer in their LNCS/LNAI series. In addition, revised versions of selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Logic (Elsevier).