Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering

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.

Klappentext
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering, SOCASE 2008, held in Estoril, Portugal, as an associated event of AAMAS 2008, the main international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers address a range of topics at the intersection of service-oriented computing, semantic technology, and intelligent multiagent systems, such as: service description and discovery; planning, composition and negotiation; semantic processes and service agents; and applications.

Inhalt
A Middleware Architecture for Building Contract-Aware Agent-Based Services.- A Knowledge Technologies-Based Multi-agent System for eGovernment Environments.- Towards a Broker Agent in the Semantic Services Environment.- Pattern-Based Semantic Tagging for Ontology Population.- Service-Based Integration of Grid and Multi-Agent Systems Models.- Discovering Homogenous Service Communities through Web Service Clustering.- Collaborative Learning Agents Supporting Service Network Management.- A Multi-Agent Architecture for NATO Network Enabled Capabilities: Enabling Semantic Interoperability in Dynamic Environments (NC3A RD-2376).- An Agent for Asymmetric Process Mediation in Open Environments.- Towards an Emergent Taxonomy Approach for Adaptive Profiling.- Commitment-Based Service Coordination.