This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'98, held in cognition with Agents World in July 1998 in Paris. The book presents nine invited contributions together with 14 revised full papers selected from a total of 54 submissions. The book is divided in parts on systems and applications; issues of design, querying, and communication; rational cooperation and electronic commerce; adaptive and collaborative information gathering; and mobile information agents in the internet.

These are the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2003), held at the Sonera Conference Center in H- sinki, Finland, August 27–29, 2003. It was co-located with the 4th Agentcities Information Days. One key challenge of developing advanced agent-based information systems is to balance the autonomy of networked data and knowledge sources with the pot- tial payo? of leveraging them by the appropriate use of intelligent information agents on the Internet. An information agent is a computational software entity thathasaccesstooneormultiple,heterogeneous,anddistributeddataandinf- mation sources; proactively searches for and maintains relevant information on behalfofitshumanusersorotheragents,preferablyjust-in-time. Inotherwords, it is managing and overcoming the di?culties associated with information ov- load in the open and exponentially growing Internet and Web. Depending on the application and tasks at hand information agents may collaborate in open, n- worked data and information environments to provide added value to a variety of applications in di?erent domains. Thus, research and development of inf- mation agents is inherently interdisciplinary: It requires expertise in information retrieval, arti?cial intelligence, database systems, human-computer interaction, and Internet and Web technology. Initiated in 1997, the purpose of the annual international workshop series on cooperativeinformationagents(CIA)istoprovideaninterdisciplinaryforumfor researchers, software developers, and managers to get informed about, present, anddiscussthelatesthigh-qualityresultsinadvancementsoftheoryandpractice in information agent technology for the Internet and Web. Each event of this renowned series attempts to capture the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of this research area by calling for contributions from di?erent research communities, and by promoting open and informative discussions on all related topics.

This book presents 12 revised full papers on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: seven papers were initially presented at the AMEC 2000 Workshop and the five others were solicited by the volume editors in order to achieve competent coverage of all relevant topics. The book is divided in topical sections on electronic negotiation models for agents, formal issues for agents operating on electronic market places, virtual trading institutions and platforms, and trading strategies for interrelated transactions.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, Morpheus, Kaza, and several others. In P2P systems, a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power and the storage capacity of the hosts composing the network, and because they realize a completely open decentralized environment where everybody can join in autonomously. Although researchers working on distributed computing, multiagent systems, databases, and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it is only recently that papers motivated by the current P2P paradigm have started appearing in high quality conferences and workshops. In particular, research on agent systems appears to be most relevant because multiagent systems have always been thought of as networks of autonomous peers since their inception. Agents, which can be superimposed on the P2P architecture, embody the description of task environments, decision-support capabilities, social behaviors, trust and reputation, and interaction protocols among peers. The emphasis on decentralization, autonomy, ease, and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages also leads to significant potential problems. Most prominent among these are coordination – the ability of an agent to make decisions on its own actions in the context of activities of other agents, and scalability – the value of the P2P systems in how well they self-organize so as to scale along several dimensions, including complexity, heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, etc. This book brings together an introduction, three invited articles, and revised versions of the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia, July 2003.

Improvements in computer networking have heralded great expectations for computer-mediated distributed work. However, experience has revealed that, as information flow improves, a central problem for distributed workers is the administration, management and control of that information. Research into Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) investigates design methods and technologies for the support of collaboration, communication and coordination of distributed group work, both within and among organizations. In tandem with this focus on the support of distributed communication and collaboration, there have been exciting developments in the fields of Intelligent Agents and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), notably in the concepts, theories and deployment of intelligent agents as a means of distributing computer-based problem solving expertise. The paradigm of multi-agent systems forms a proposed basis for the design of CSCW architectures, the support of CSCW operations and for addressing some of the problems of cooperative working. The application of a multi-agent approach to CSCW makes information exchange among the participants easier by delivering support to the participants, assisting workflows and procedures, and providing convenient user interfaces to CSCW systems. Furthermore, the ideas inherent in such an approach are also applicable to other domains, such as support for interactive learning. Organizations that seek to exploit the advantages offered through CSCW will benefit from the integration of agents in the management and use of their corporate knowledge, especially with the advancement of wired or wireless networking, pervasive computing, and other information technologies. Agent Supported Cooperative Work describes the state of the art in this exciting new area, covering both theoretical foundations and practical applications of ASCW. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to ASCW, bringing together contributions from international experts in the field.

This new ASIST monograph is the first to comprehensively address the history, theory, and practical applications of citation analysis, a field which has grown from Garfield's seed of an idea, and to examine its impact on scholarly research forty years after its inception. In bringing together the analyses, insights, and reflections of more than thirty-five leading lights, editors Cronin and Atkins have produced both a comprehensive survey of citation indexing and its applications and a beautifully-realized tribute to Eugene Garfield and his vision, in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday.

The use of modern planning and optimization systems for process synchronization in value networks requires the optimal information exchange between the entities involved. The central focus of Sven Grolik's study is the development of efficient mechanisms for the coordination of information allocation by the example of interconnected transportation marketplaces. Unlike traditional information allocation algorithms, the algorithms developed in his analysis are based on update mechanisms which maintain a weak consistency of replicated information in the network. Sven Grolik shows that these algorithms enable savings concerning the update costs as well as increase the performance within the network, but at the same time guarantee compliance with quality of service levels concerning the currency of information. The focus of this work is the development of decentralized, online algorithms which make a logically distributed computation possible on the basis of local information. The development of these innovative algorithms is based on approaches of multi-agent system theory as well as distributed simulated annealing techniques.

The three volume set LNAI 4251, LNAI 4252, and LNAI 4253 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2006, held in Bournemouth, UK, in October 2006. The 480 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 1400 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing.

Agent Technology, or Agent-Based Approaches, is a new paradigm for developing software applications. It has been hailed as 'the next significant breakthrough in software development', and 'the new revolution in software' after object technology or object-oriented programming. In this context, an agent is a computer system which is capable of act

This book presents new developments in data analysis, classification and multivariate statistics, and in their algorithmic implementation. The volume offers contributions to the theory of clustering and discrimination, multidimensional data analysis, data mining, and robust statistics with a special emphasis on the novel Forward Search approach. Many papers provide significant insight in a wide range of fields of application. Customer satisfaction and service evaluation are two examples of such emerging fields.