Sonia Bergamaschi - Böcker

This book presents 10 chapters on various aspects of intelligent information agents contributed by members of the respective AgentLink special interest group.The papers are organized in three parts on agent-based information systems, adaptive information agents, and coordination of information agents. Also included are a comprehensive introduction and surveys for each of the three parts.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is attracting enormous media attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. The peers are autonomous, or as some call them, first-class citizens. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm for their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network and make their under-utilized resources available to others. 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. Research in agent systems in particular appears to be most relevant because, since their inception, multiagent systems have always been thought of as networks of peers. The multiagent paradigm can thus be superimposed on the P2P architecture, where agents embody the description of the task environments, the decision-support capabilities, the collective behavior, and the interaction protocols of each peer. The emphasis in this context on decentralization, user autonomy, ease and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages also leads to significant potential problems. Most prominent among these problems 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 lies in how well they scale along several dimensions, including complexity, heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, and so on.This volume presents the fully revised papers presented at the Third International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2004, held in New York City on July 19, 2004 in the context of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004). The volume is organized in topicalsections on P2P networks and search performance, emergent communities and social behaviours, semantic integration, mobile P2P systems, adaptive systems, agent-based resource discovery, as well as trust and reputation.

The aim of the International Workshop on Databases, Information Systems and P2P Computing was to explore the promise of P2P to o?er exciting new p- sibilities in distributed information processing and database technologies. The realization of this promise lies fundamentally in the availability of enhanced services such as structured ways for classifying and registering shared infor- tion, veri?cation and certi?cation of information, content distributed schemes and quality of content, security features, information discovery and accessib- ity, interoperation and composition of active information services, and ?nally market-based mechanisms to allow cooperative and noncooperative information exchanges. The P2P paradigm lends itself to constructing large-scale, complex, adaptive, autonomous and heterogeneous database and information systems, endowed with clearly speci?ed and di?erential capabilities to negotiate, bargain, coordinate and self-organize the information exchanges in large-scale networks. This vision will have a radical impact on the structure of complex organizations (business, sci- ti?c or otherwise) and on the emergence and the formation of social communities, and on how the information is organized and processed. The P2P information paradigm naturally encompasses static and wireless connectivity and static and mobile architectures. Wireless connectivity combined with the increasingly small and powerful mobile devices and sensors poses new challenges as well as opp- tunities to the database community. Information becomes ubiquitous, highly distributed and accessible anywhere and at any time over highly dynamic, - stable networks with very severe constraints on the information management and processing capabilities.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, in May 2006, in the context of the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2006. The 10 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions; they are fully revised to incorporate reviewers' comments and discussions at the workshop. The volume is organized in topical sections on P2P Infrastructure, agents in P2P, P2P search, and applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2007, held in Honululu, Hawaii, USA, in May 2007, in the context of the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2007.

The two-volume set LNCS 7565 and 7566 constitutes the refereed proceedings of three confederated international conferences: Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2012), Distributed Objects and Applications - Secure Virtual Infrastructures (DOA-SVI 2012), and Ontologies, DataBases and Applications of SEmantics (ODBASE 2012) held as part of OTM 2012 in September 2012 in Rome, Italy. The 53 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 169 submissions. The 22 full papers included in the first volume constitute the proceedings of CoopIS 2012 and are organized in topical sections on business process design; process verification and analysis; service-oriented architectures and cloud; security, risk, and prediction; discovery and detection; collaboration; and 5 short papers.