Extending Web Services Technologies addresses the rapidly growing impact of Multi-Agent Systems on web services tools and techniques. In particular, the book addresses the potential for MAS techniques to impact the difficult challenges that must be tackled for web services technology to realize its promises. The area of web services offers the multi-agent community exciting research possibilities, including similarities in system architectures, powerful tools, and a focus on issues such as trust and reliability. Likewise, techniques developed in the multi-agent research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast growing technology.

The contents contain contributions by leading international researchers and professionals from both the web services and Multi-Agent Systems community. Topics include semantic web services and associated standards, architectures integrating agents and services, transactions, authorization, and service composition.

Extending Web Services Technologies addresses the rapidly growing impact of Multi-Agent Systems on web services tools and techniques. In particular, the book addresses the potential for MAS techniques to impact the difficult challenges that must be tackled for web services technology to realize its promises. The area of web services offers the multi-agent community exciting research possibilities, including similarities in system architectures, powerful tools, and a focus on issues such as trust and reliability. Likewise, techniques developed in the multi-agent research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast growing technology.

The contents contain contributions by leading international researchers and professionals from both the web services and Multi-Agent Systems community. Topics include semantic web services and associated standards, architectures integrating agents and services, transactions, authorization, and service composition.

The agents approach is not just another abstract computing paradigm, but has matured during recent years into a booming research area and software engineering technology which holds great promise for the design and application of complex distributed systems.
This book presents 12 revised full chapters grouped around 3 main topics in intelligent agent systems; agent architectures, formal theories of rationality and cooperation and collaboration. Among the topics addressed are software agents, BDI architectures, social commitment, believable agents and artificial life. The book is based on the Workshop on Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Intelligent Agents held at the Fourth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Cairns, Australia, in August 1996.