Two significant factors combine to drive the phenomenon of e-Business. Competition constantly motivates companies in their marketplaces, while rapidly developing information technologies offer new opportunities and challenges.

For Mike Papazoglou and Piet Ribbers, both business and technology are integral to e-Business. They demonstrate here how a solid understanding of business, organization, management and technology is crucial to an understanding of what e-Business is today and how it is going to be shaped in the future.

e-Business: Organisational and Technical Foundations focuses on the development of e-Business between and within enterprises. In particular it addresses how enterprises collaborate, what coordination mechanism are necessary and how this is reflected at the technical infrastructure level.

It includes: Abundant real-world examples to encourage readers to understand and appreciate real-lifee-BusinessAn analytical and critical approach to understanding business issues, decision-making and technology use and developmentExtensive end of chapter discussion questions and assignments for studentsA companion website at www.wiley.com/go/ebusiness with additional exercises for students and PowerPoint slides and solutions for lecturers

WelcometotheproceedingsoftheinauguralInternationalConferenceonService- Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2003). This was the ?rst of a series of events that willevolveoverthecomingyears,andwewerehappytoholdtheeventinTrento, where the idea for this conference was born. Trento is a lovely city with many Renaissance buildings, testimony to its great medieval past, and has a bustling modern university ready to master the future. The participants visited Trento at the beginning of the winter season, with excellent opportunities for skiing and hiking. The city o?ers many other tourist attractions, some of which, we hope, the participants took the opportunity to enjoy. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is the new emerging paradigm for d- tributed computing and e-business processing which has evolved from obje- oriented and component computing to one that enables us to build agile n- works of collaborating business applications distributed within and across or- nizational boundaries. ICSOC aims to become the ?agship conference in the area of service-oriented computing,whichisattractingmoreandmoreresearchersandpractitionersfrom both academia and industry. The beginnings are extremely promising, beyond our most optimistic expectations. We were deluged by requests for further inf- mation from all parts of the world and by a very high number of submissions. In fact, the success of a conference depends on the quality of the papers and on the organizational e?orts of the conference o?cers and secretariat. On the research side, exciting new areas in service computing, including service modeling, composition, business transactions and collaborations, service developmentandmanagement,P2PandGridcomputing,mobilecomputing,and security, were reported in the conference, in conjunction with keynote addresses and informative tutorials o?ered by leaders in the ?eld.

Traditional database systems have been able to manipulate large amounts of data efficiently, whilst artificial intelligence (and in particular expert systems) have reasoned with rules, but rarely with data. It has become evident that to build truly intelligent information systems, facilities are required from artificial intelligence and database and distributed technologies. This book consists of seventeen selected and revised papers on the next generation of information systems, based on papers presented at two workshops, one on integrating artificial intelligence and databases, and the other on intelligent and cooperating information systems. The papers address several core issues, such as intelligence, distribution, and multi-agent/cooperative systems, and focuses on designing and building such systems mainly through the use of intelligent agents. The book presents up-to-date developments in this interdisciplinary field, covering information systems, artificial intelligence, and distributed systems.