Paving the Way for an Open Service Market We live in an age when powerful communications technology is becoming available to everyone. From our home we can send and receive not only analogue voice, but also growing volumes of digital information and even intelligence in the form of agents. We are becoming increasingly mobile and are expecting the same level of connectivity in the home, in the office, and on the road. The regulatory and commercial environment in which we communicate is changing. The telecommunications market is becoming increasingly competitive. The Internet is erasing the borders between information technology and telecommunications. And the way we do business is ever more dominated by electronic exchanges of information. Is our technology ready for the open market of networks and services? Can we manage the growing complexity of computing and telecommunications technology and place it at the service of the people? The challenge for the research community is to develop the tools and techniques that will ultimately bring the full power of communications and information to everyone, in a way that everyone can easily use. The Sixth International Conference on Intelligence in Services and Networks (IS&N 99) is all about technology for paving the way to the open services market. Since the first IS&N conference in 1992 the focus of the IS&N program has continually shifted. We see existing technologies maturing while new ones emerge, but the bottom line has always been putting technology at the service of the people."

This book consitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligence in Services and Networks, IS&N'98 in Antwerp, Belgium, in May 1998. IS&N'98 was devoted to Technology for Ubiquitous Telecom Services. The 40 revised full papers presented in a homogeneous style and editing were selected from more than 80 submissions. The book is divided in sections on quality of service, service management, agent technology and applications, architechtures, mobility, platforms, electronic commerce, service creation, network management, gateways to CORBA, and security.

Intelligence in Services and Networks focuses on exploring how best the inherent intelligence in networks may be employed and enhanced to provide, firstly, flexibility and open competition in the provision of communications-based services and, secondly, the means for managing and administering end-to-end communication systems that span many independent network operators and service providers. The emphasis in this area of research is on applying the best techniques for system specification and corresponding software development, as a basis for the creation of open platforms, and subsequent standardisation. Resolving this issue is key to the successful deployment of advanced communications in the deregulated and highly competitive environment that will underpin any futher "information society."

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference in Broadband Services and Networks, IS&N '95, held in Heraclion, Greece, in October 1995; this book summarizes at the same time the main results of a group of RACE projects sponsored by the European Commission for several years. To meet the new challenges in broadband communication, service engineering has now emerged as a new discipline strongly related to software engineering; particularly the concepts of object-orientation and open distributed processing are being adopted. The book presents 44 full papers and 8 posters selected from 88 submissions. Among the issues addressed are service architecture, usability, communications management, advanced communication services, security, and service creation.