AAMAS 2009 encourages the submission of *original* papers covering theoretical, experimental, methodological, and application issues in autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Authors are discouraged to submit papers describing work that has already been published in previous AAMAS workshops with post-proceedings publications and/or published as short papers in previous AAMAS proceedings, unless that the authors *clearly* demonstrate significant new content with respect to the previous publication.

The main theme of AAMAS 2009, based on feedback from previous conferences, will be reinforcing the rich panorama of *interconnections* in the field. We encourage the community, and the authors in particular, to reflect about their work not as belonging to just a niche in a long list of topics, but rather as a point in an abstract topological space defined by three complementary axes:
(i) the *focus* of the work, i.e., what is the AAMAS topic or  contribution of the work
(ii) the *description level*, i.e., whether this contribution is mostly in the theoretical / architectural / applicative level
(iii) the intellectual *inspiration source*, i.e., what scientific domain has given the main ideas for the contribution

Additionaly, the *description level* and *inspiration source* axes will be used in the reviewing process. The first one points out how ideally should your paper be evaluated and the second indicates what kind of scientific background is best for people who review your paper.

Every paper will be evaluated appropriately with respect to each of these three axes. Moreover, the use of this topological space will help this year and future AAMAS conference organizers to better stress some particular points in this space to be highlighted in the program, as it was the case of the special tracks presented in AAMAS 2008 and will be the case of the special area tracks in AAMAS 2009.