Michael P. Papazoglou – författare

WelcometotheproceedingsoftheinauguralInternationalConferenceonService- Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2003). This was the ?rst of a series of events that willevolveoverthecomingyears,andwewerehappytoholdtheeventinTrento, where the idea for this conference was born. Trento is a lovely city with many Renaissance buildings, testimony to its great medieval past, and has a bustling modern university ready to master the future. The participants visited Trento at the beginning of the winter season, with excellent opportunities for skiing and hiking. The city o?ers many other tourist attractions, some of which, we hope, the participants took the opportunity to enjoy. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is the new emerging paradigm for d- tributed computing and e-business processing which has evolved from obje- oriented and component computing to one that enables us to build agile n- works of collaborating business applications distributed within and across or- nizational boundaries. ICSOC aims to become the ?agship conference in the area of service-oriented computing,whichisattractingmoreandmoreresearchersandpractitionersfrom both academia and industry.The beginnings are extremely promising, beyond our most optimistic expectations. We were deluged by requests for further inf- mation from all parts of the world and by a very high number of submissions. In fact, the success of a conference depends on the quality of the papers and on the organizational e?orts of the conference o?cers and secretariat. On the research side, exciting new areas in service computing, including service modeling, composition, business transactions and collaborations, service developmentandmanagement,P2PandGridcomputing,mobilecomputing,and security, were reported in the conference, in conjunction with keynote addresses and informative tutorials o?ered by leaders in the ?eld.

Traditional database systems have been able to manipulatelarge amounts of data efficiently, whilst artificialintelligence (and in particular expert systems) havereasoned with rules, but rarely with data. It has becomeevident that to build truly intelligent information systems,facilities are required from artificial intelligence anddatabase and distributed technologies.This book consists of seventeen selected and revised paperson the next generation of information systems, based onpapers presented at two workshops, one on integratingartificial intelligence and databases, and the other onintelligent and cooperating information systems. The papersaddress several core issues, such as intelligence,distribution, and multi-agent/cooperative systems, andfocuses on designing and building such systems mainlythrough the use of intelligent agents. The book presentsup-to-date developments in this interdisciplinary field,covering information systems, artificial intelligence, anddistributed systems.