This book will be the first to bring together research material from different communities, Computer Science and especially Artificial Intelligence, and Social Sciences, e.g. Anthropology, Social Psychology, Political Science that present ideas and viewpoints, methods and models on inter-cultural collaboration and negotiation.

With increasing globalization of business and science, cultural differences of the parties are an important factor that affects the process and outcomes of collaborative and self-interested interactions. The social science literature on culture as well as human collaboration and negotiation is vast. Most of this literature is devoted to work within the same culture. Artificial intelligence researchers, on the other hand, have developed computational models of cooperation, conflict resolution and negotiation, but paying almost no attention to identifying and modeling cultural factors. In recent years, we have witnessed a great increase in interest in understanding inter-cultural interactions. This has led to increased interest of social scientists and computational scientists in theoretical and experimental analysis of inter-cultural exchanges, modeling and support. Currently, these communities are largely unconnected. There is a great need to bring them together to share research work and experiences, discuss ideas and forge interdisciplinary collaborative relations.

The book will be of interest to researchers from AI/computer science and social/behavioral sciences fields, such as psychology, sociology, communications, organizational science.

This book is the first to bring together research material from different communities, Computer Science and especially Artificial Intelligence, and Social Sciences, e.g. Anthropology, Social Psychology, Political Science that present ideas and viewpoints, methods and models on inter-cultural collaboration and negotiation. With increasing globalization of business and science, cultural differences of the parties are an important factor that affects the process and outcomes of collaborative and self-interested interactions. The social science literature on culture as well as human collaboration and negotiation is vast. Most of this literature is devoted to work within the same culture. Artificial intelligence researchers, on the other hand, have developed computational models of cooperation, conflict resolution and negotiation, but paying almost no attention to identifying and modeling cultural factors. In recent years, we have witnessed a great increase in interest in understanding inter-cultural interactions. This has led to increased interest of social scientists and computational scientists in theoretical and experimental analysis of inter-cultural exchanges, modeling and support. Currently, these communities are largely unconnected. There is a great need to bring them together to share research work and experiences, discuss ideas and forge interdisciplinary collaborative relations. This book will be of interest to researchers from AI/computer science and social/behavioral sciences fields, such as psychology, sociology, communications, organizational science.

The all pervasive web is influencing all aspects of human endeavour. In order to strengthen the description of web resources, so that they are more meaningful to both humans and machines, web semantics have been proposed. These allow better annotation, understanding, search, interpretation and composition of these - sources. The growing importance of these has brought about a great increase in research into these issues. We propose a series of books that will address key issues in web semantics on an annual basis. This book series can be considered as an extended journal published annually. The series will combine theoretical results, standards, and their realizations in applications and implementations. The series is titled "Advances in Web Sem- tics" and will be published periodically by Springer to promote emerging Semantic Web technologies. It will contain the cream of the collective contribution of the Int- national Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Web Semantics Working Group; WG 2. 12 & WG 12. 4. This book, addressing the current state of the art, is the first in the series. In subsequent years, books will address a particular theme, topic or issue where the greatest advances are being made. Examples of such topics include: (i) process semantics, (ii) web services, (iii) ontologies, (iv) workflows, (v) trust and reputation, (vi) web applications, etc. Periodically, perhaps every five years, there will be a scene-setting state of the art volume.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering, SOCASE 2007, held in Honolulu, HI, USA as an associated event of AAMAS 2007. The volume is rounded off with selected four best papers from the Service-Oriented Computing and Agent-based Engineering Workshop, SOCABE 2006, held at AAMAS 2006.

These proceedings contain the papers accepted for presentation at the Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003) held on Sanibel Island, Florida, U. S. A., October 20-23, 2003. Following the success of ISWC 2002 that washeldinSardiniainJune2002, ISWC2003enjoyedagreatlyincreasedinterest in the conference themes. The number of submitted papers more than doubled compared with ISWC 2002 to 283. Of those, 262 were submitted to the research track and 21 to the industrial track. With rare exceptions, each submission was evaluated by three program committee members whose reviews were coordinated by members of the senior program committee. This year 49 papers in the research track and 9 papers in the industrial track were accepted. The high quality of ISWC 2003 was the result of the joint e?ort of many people. First of all we would like to thank the authors for their high-quality submissions and the members of the program committee for their reviewing and review coordination e?orts. We would like to extend special thanks to Christoph Bussler for chairing the industrial track, to Mike Dean for his help with the conference management software, the web site, and conference publicity, and to Massimo Paolucci for helping with the organization of the proceedings and arranging sponsorships.