This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the three agent-related workshops held during the NetObjectDays international conference, NODe 2002, held in Erfurt, Germany, in October 2002. The 23 revised full papers presented with a keynote paper and 2 abstracts were carefully selected during 2 rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent-oriented requirements engineering and specification, agent-oriented software engineering, reuse, negotiation and communication, large complex systems, e-business, and applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Web- and Database-Related Workshops held during the NetObjectDays international conference NODe 2002, in Erfurt, Germany, in October 2002. The 19 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote papers were carefully selected during 2 rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on advanced Web-services, UDDI extensions, description and classification of Web services, applications based on Web-services, indexing and accessing, Web and XML databases, mobile devices and the Internet, and XML query languages.

Analyzes key critical HR variables and defines previously undiscovered issues in the HR field.

"This book presents various applications of the growing perspective of agent technologies as they apply the web engineering"--Provided by publisher.

The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, ent- prise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software is to be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on di?- ent platforms, without recompilation, and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and its users. Furthermore, software must be robust and ̈ autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with a minimum of overhead and interference. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of software systems. They o?er higher-level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, p- ception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which need conceptual modelling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, tra- action control, adaptive work?ows, brokering and integration of disparate inf- mation sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and ?exible treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more e?ective requirements an- ysis and architectural/detailed design.

The refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning are presented in this volume. Fifteen full research papers and eighteen poster papers are presented along with three invited talks. The papers address all aspects of case-based reasoning, featuring original theoretical research, applied research, and applications with practical, social, environmental, and economic significance.

Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations contains selected articles from PRO-VE'03, the Fourth Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Lugano, Switzerland in October 2003. This fourth edition includes a rich set of papers revealing the progress and achievements in the main current focus areas: -VO breeding environments; -Formation of collaborative networked organizations; -Ontologies and knowledge management; -Process models and interoperability; -Infrastructures; -Multi-agent approaches. In spite of many valid contributions in these areas, many research challenges remain. This is clearly stated in a number of papers suggesting a new research agenda and strategic research roadmaps for advanced virtual organizations. With the selected papers included in this book, PRO-VE pursues its double mission as a forum for presentation and discussion of achievements as well as a place to discuss and suggest new directions and research strategies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, PRIMA 2004, held in Auckland, New Zealand in August 2004 in conjunction with PRICAI 2004. The 24 revised full papers presented went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and were selected from 52 submissions. The papers address many current topics in multi-agent research and development, ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to various applications in different fields.

In this book, we present a collection of papers around the topic of Agent- Mediated Knowledge Management. Most of the papers are extended and - provedversions of work presented at the symposium on Agent-Mediated Kno- edge Management held during the AAAI Spring Symposia Series in March 2003 at Stanford University. The aim of the Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management symposium was to bring together researchers and practitioners of the ?elds of KM and agent te- nologiestodiscussthebene?ts,possibilitiesandadded-valueofcross-fertilization. Knowledge Management (KM) has been a predominant trend in bu- ness in recent years. Not only is Knowledge Management an important ?eld of applicationfor AIandrelatedtechniques,suchasCBRtechnologyforintelligent lessons-learned systems, it also provides new challenges to the AI community, like, for example, context-aware knowledge delivery. Scaling up research pro- typestoreal-worldsolutionsusuallyrequiresanapplication-drivenintegrationof several basic technologies, e.g., ontologies for knowledge sharing and reuse, c- laboration support like CSCW systems, and personalized information services. Typical characteristics to be dealt with in such an integration are: - manifold, logically and physically dispersed actors and knowledge sources, - di?erent degrees of formalization of knowledge, - di?erent kinds of (Web-based) services and (legacy) systems, - con?icts between local (individual) and global (group or organizational) goals.

“Intelligent systems must perform in order to be in demand. ” Intelligent systems technology is being applied steadily in solving many day-to-day problems. Each year the list of real-world deployed applications that inconspicuously host the results of research in the area grows considerably. These applications are having a significant impact in industrial operations, in financial circles, in transportation, in education, in medicine, in consumer products, in games and elsewhere. A set of selected papers presented at the seventeenth in the series of conferences on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (IEA/AIE 2004), sponsored by the International Society of Applied Intelligence, is offered in this manuscript. These papers highlight novel applications of the technology and show how new research could lead to new and innovative applications. We hope that you find these papers to be educational, useful in your own research, and stimulating. In addition, we have introduced some special sessions to emphasize a few areas of artificial intelligence (AI) that are either relatively new, have received considerable attention recently or perhaps have not yet been represented well. To this end, we have included special sessions on e-learning, bioinformatics, and human-robot interaction (HRI) to complement the usual offerings in areas such as data mining, machine learning, intelligent systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, autonomous agents, natural language processing, intelligent user interfaces, evolutionary computing, fuzzy logic, computer vision and image processing, reasoning, heuristic search, security, Internet applications, constraint satisfaction problems, design, and expert systems.