Chief architect of the Taj Mahal, Ustad Ahmed Lahauri has been kidnapped, leaving work on the construction unfinished. Emperor Shah Jahan now has to find a new architect for his dream project. But the ghost of his dead empress, Mumtaz Mahal, is determined not to let any other architect work on her mausoleum. She summons the DOA detectives and commands them to find the missing architect before it's too late and she's saddled with as hideous tomb for eternity. Soon the detectives discover that there is much more to the Ustad's disappearance than a mere kidnapping. There is a traitor in the imperial court who will stop at nothing till he fulfils his evil designs! Who could it be? Will the detectives be able to stop his wicked plans? Will they be able to ensure that the magnificent Taj Mahal gets built?

Is it real? Could it happen? Did it happen? Will it happen? In California, eighteen-year-old Allen Dornac enjoyed surfing with his three cousins. In Vietnam, an entire squad of one sergeant and five privates was wiped out by one shell. In Maryland, a man with a smile wandered the streets and the buses searching for the story of his past.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the three confederated conferences CoopIS 2002, DOA 2002, and ODBASE 2002, held in Irvine, CA, USA, in October/November 2002. The 77 revised full papers and 10 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 291 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on interoperability, workflow, mobility, agents, peer-to-peer and ubiquitous, work process, business and transaction, infrastructure, query processing, quality issues, agents and middleware, cooperative systems, ORB enhancements, Web services, distributed object scalability and heterogeneity, dependability and security, reflection and reconfiguration, real-time scheduling, component-based applications, ontology languages, conceptual modeling, ontology management, ontology development and engineering, XML and data integration, and tools for the intelligent Web.

Travel back in time with the DOA gang as they solve out-of-this-world mysteries using their wits, will and Tuk Tuk, their autorickshaw with attitude, which also happens to be a time machine! The Sceptre of Ra has been stolen, putting the Horus Throne in danger. Pharaoh Hatsheput must find the regal sceptre before the new moon or give up the throne to her nephew, the young and ambitious pharaoh-in-waiting Thutmosis III. Desperate, she summons her father, Thutmosis I, from the dead and sends him to bring in the DOA detectives to solve this perplexing mystery before the new moon. Soon, the detectives discover that there is much more to the theft. An attack by a black cobra, a poisoned drink, ill omens everywhere . . . something sinister is definitely afoot in the great palace. Will the detectives be able to counter Egyptian heka magic and find the sceptre and the thief in time, or will Hatshepsut carry out her threat of throwing them to the crocodiles?

This two-volume set LNCS 3760/3761 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the three confederated conferences CoopIS 2005, DOA 2005, and ODBASE 2005 held as OTM 2005 in Agia Napa, Cyprus in October/November 2005. The 89 revised full and 7 short papers presented together with 3 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 360 submissions. Corresponding with the three OTM 2005 main conferences CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE, the papers are organized in topical sections on workflow, workflow and business processes, mining and filtering, petri nets and processs management, information access and integrity, heterogeneity, semantics, querying and content delivery, Web services, agents, security, integrity and consistency, chain and collaboration mangement, Web services and service-oriented architectures, multicast and fault tolerance, communication services, techniques for application hosting, mobility, security and data persistence, component middleware, java environments, peer-to-peer computing architectures, aspect oriented middleware, information integration and modeling, query processing, ontology construction, metadata, information retrieval and classification, system verification and evaluation, and active rules and Web services.

missions in fact also treat an envisaged mutual impact among them. As for the 2002 edition in Irvine, the organizers wanted to stimulate this cross-pollination with a program of shared famous keynote speakers (this year we got Sycara, - ble, Soley and Mylopoulos!), and encouraged multiple attendance by providing authors with free access to another conference or workshop of their choice. We received an even larger number of submissions than last year for the three conferences (360 in total) and the workshops (170 in total). Not only can we therefore again claim a measurable success in attracting a representative volume of scienti?c papers, but such a harvest allowed the program committees of course to compose a high-quality cross-section of worldwide research in the areas covered. In spite of the increased number of submissions, the Program Chairs of the three main conferences decided to accept only approximately the same number of papers for presentation and publication as in 2002 (i. e. , around 1 paper out of every 4–5 submitted). For the workshops, the acceptance rate was about 1 in 2. Also for this reason, we decided to separate the proceedings into two volumes with their own titles, and we are grateful to Springer-Verlag for their collaboration in producing these two books. The reviewing process by the respective program committees was very professional and each paper in the main conferences was reviewed by at least three referees.

This two-volume set LNCS 3290/3291 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the three confederated conferences CoopIS 2004, DOA 2004, and ODBASE 2004 held as OTM 2004 in Agia Napa, Cyprus in October 2004. The 94 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 380 submissions. In accordance with the three OTM 2004 main conferences CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE, the papers are devoted to interoperability, workflow, and cooperation; distributed objects, infrastructure and enabling technology, and Internet computing; and data and Web semantics.

A special mention for 2004 is in order for the new Doctoral Symposium Workshop where three young postdoc researchers organized an original setup and formula to bring PhD students together and allow them to submit their research proposals for selection. A limited number of the submissions and their approaches were independently evaluated by a panel of senior experts at the conference, and presented by the students in front of a wider audience. These students also got free access to all other parts of the OTM program, and only paid a heavily discounted fee for the Doctoral Symposium itself. (In fact their attendance was largely sponsored by the other participants!) If evaluated as successful, it is the intention of the General Chairs to expand this model in future editions of the OTM conferences and so draw in an audience of young researchers to the OnTheMove forum. All three main conferences and the associated workshops share the d- tributed aspects of modern computing systems, and the resulting applicati- pull created by the Internet and the so-called Semantic Web. For DOA 2004, the primary emphasis stayed on the distributed object infrastructure; for ODBASE 2004, it was the knowledge bases and methods required for enabling the use of formalsemantics;andforCoopIS2004themaintopicwastheinteractionofsuch technologies and methods with management issues, such as occurs in networked organizations. These subject areas naturally overlap and many submissions in factalsotreatenvisagedmutualimpactsamongthem.

This two-volume set LNCS 4275/4276 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the four confederated conferences CoopIS 2006, DOA 2006, GADA 2006, and ODBASE 2006 held as OTM 2006 in Montpellier, France in October/November 2006. The 106 revised full and 9 short papers presented together with 4 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 361 submissions. Corresponding with the four OTM 2006 main conferences CoopIS, ODBASE, GADA, and DOA, the papers are organized in topical sections on distributed information systems, workflow modelling, workflow management and discovery, dynamic and adaptable workflows, services metrics and pricing, formal approaches to services, trust and security in cooperative IS, P2P systems, collaborative systems design and development, collaborative systems development, cooperative IS applications, foundations, metadata, design, ontology mappings, information integration, agents, contexts, similarity and matching, resource selection and management, P2P-based systems, grid file transfer, parallel applications, scheduling in grid environments, autonomous and autonomic computing, grid infrastructures for data analysis, access control and security, programming aspects for developing scientific grid components, databases and data grids, distributed applications, evaluation, services, communications, searching techniques, types and notations, adaptivity, middleware, distribution support, and self-organisation.