Distributed applications are a necessity in most central application sectors of the contemporary information society, including e-commerce, e-banking, e-learning, e-health, telecommunication and transportation. This results from a tremendous growth of the role that the Internet plays in business, administration and our everyday activities. This trend is going to be even further expanded in the context of advances in broadband wireless communication. This title focuses on the techniques available or under development with the goal to ease the burden of constructing reliable and maintainable interoperable information systems providing services in the global communicating environment. The topics covered in this book include: context-aware applications; integration and interoperability of distributed systems; software architectures and services for open distributed systems; management, security and quality of service issues in distributed systems; software agents and mobility; and Internet and other related problem areas.The book contains the proceedings of the Third International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS'2001), which was held in September 2001 in Krakow, Poland, and sponsored by the International Federation on Information Processing (IFIP). The conference program presents the state of the art in research concerning distributed and interoperable systems. This is a topical research area where much activity is currently in progress. Interesting new aspects and innovative contributions are still arising regularly. The DAIS series of conferences is one of the main international forums where these important findings are reported.
