Michael N. Huhns - Böcker

This comprehensive text explains the principles and practice of Web services and relates all concepts to practical examples and emerging standards.  Its discussions include: OntologiesSemantic web technologiesPeer-to-peer service discoveryService selectionWeb structure and link analysisDistributed transactionsProcess modellingConsistency management. The application of these technologies is clearly explained within the context of planning, negotiation, contracts, compliance, privacy, and network policies. The presentation of the intellectual underpinnings of Web services draws from several key disciplines such as databases, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems for techniques and formalisms.  Ideas from these disciplines are united in the context of Web services and service-based applications. Featuring an accompanying website and teacher’s manual that includes a complete set of transparencies for lectures, copies of open-source software for exercises and working implementations, and resources to conduct course projects, this book makes an excellent graduate textbook.  It will also prove an invaluable reference and training tool for practitioners.

After two successful MATES conferences in Erfurt 2003 and 2004, the 3rd G- man conference on Multi-agent System Technologies (MATES 2005) took place in Koblenz, Germany, in September 2005, and was co-located with the 28th German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI 2005). Building onotheragent-relatedeventsinGermanyinthepast,andorganized by the GI German Special Interest Group on Distributed Arti?cial Intelligence, the MATES conference series aims at promoting the theory and applications of agentsandmultiagentsystems.Incorporatingthe9thInternationalWorkshopon Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2005), the topics of interest for MATES 2005 also covered the ?elds of intelligent information agents and systems for the Internet and the (Semantic) Web. As in recent years, MATES 2005 provided a distinguished, lively and int- disciplinary forum for researchers, users, and developers of agent technology, to present and discuss the latest advances of research and development in the area of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Accordingly, the topics of MATES 2005 covered the whole range from the theory to applications of age- and multiagent technology. The technical program included a total of 24 sci- ti?c talks, and demonstrations of selected running agent systems, and both the MATES 2005 Best Paper and the CIA 2005 System Innovation awards.

The globaltrendtowardsmore?exible anddynamic businessprocessintegration and automation has led to a convergence of interests between service-oriented computing, semantic technology, and intelligent multiagent systems. In parti- lar the areas of service-oriented computing and semantic technology o?er much interestto the multiagentsystemcommunity,including similaritiesin system- chitectures and provision processes, powerful tools, and the focus on issues such as quality of service, security, and reliability. Similarly, techniques developed in themultiagentsystemsandsemantictechnologypromisetohaveastrongimpact on the fast-growing service-oriented computing technology. Service-oriented computing has emerged as an established paradigm for d- tributed computing and e-business processing. It utilizes services as fundam- tal building blocks to enable the development of agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries.Services are self-contained, platform-independent software components that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated, and deployed for the purpose of developing distributed applications across large heterogeneous networks such as the Internet. Multiagent systems are also aimed at the development of distributed - plications, however, from a di?erent but complementary perspective. Servi- oriented paradigmsaremainly focused on syntacticaland declarativede?nitions of software components, their interfaces, communication channels, and ca- bilities with the aim of creating interoperable and reliable infrastructures. In contrast, multiagent systems center on the development of reasoning and pl- ning capabilities of autonomous problem solvers that apply behavioral concepts such as interaction, collaboration, or negotiation in order to create ?exible and fault-tolerant distributed systems for dynamic and uncertain environments.

This book presents the latest research on the software crowdsourcing approach to develop large and complex software in a cloud-based platform. It develops the fundamental principles, management organization and processes, and a cloud-based infrastructure to support this new software development approach. The book examines a variety of issues in software crowdsourcing processes, including software quality, costs, diversity of solutions, and the competitive nature of crowdsourcing processes. Furthermore, the book outlines a research roadmap of this emerging field, including all the key technology and management issues for the foreseeable future. Crowdsourcing, as demonstrated by Wikipedia and Facebook for online web applications, has shown promising results for a variety of applications, including healthcare, business, gold mining exploration, education, and software development. Software crowdsourcing is emerging as a promising solution to designing, developing and maintaining software. Preliminary software crowdsourcing practices and platforms, including Apple's App Store and TopCoder, demonstrate the advantages of crowdsourcing in terms of software ecosystem expansion and product quality improvement.