Low-volume high-variety products like personalized cars or customized engines will be the key issues for manufacturing in the 21st century. The necessary control technology is based on the concept of holons, which are the units of production and behave as autonomous and cooperative agents, providing flexibility, adaptability, agility, and dynamic reconfigurability. This book presents the latest research results in agent-based manufacturing as carried out by researchers in academia and industry within the international "Holonic Manufacturing Systems" project. As this project was driven by industry, the results presented here are of vital interest not just to researchers in agent technologies or distributed artificial intelligence, but also to engineers and professionals in industry who have to respond to rapid changes and new demands in production.

Low-volume high-variety products like personalized cars or customized engines will be the key issues for manufacturing in the 21st century. The necessary control technology is based on the concept of holons, which are the units of production and behave as autonomous and cooperative agents, providing flexibility, adaptability, agility, and dynamic reconfigurability. This book presents the latest research results in agent-based manufacturing as carried out by researchers in academia and industry within the international "Holonic Manufacturing Systems" project. As this project was driven by industry, the results presented here are of vital interest not just to researchers in agent technologies or distributed artificial intelligence, but also to engineers and professionals in industry who have to respond to rapid changes and new demands in production.

This is the first international conference aimed at bringing the distributed database and distributed AI (DAD experts together, from both academia and industry, in order to discuss the issues of the next generation of knowledge based systems, namely Cooperating Knowledge Based Systems or CKBS for short. As the area of CKBS is new, we intended it to be an ideas conference - a conference where interesting new ideas, rather than results from completed projects, are explored, discussed, and debated. The conference was organised by the DAKE Centre. This is an interdisciplinary centre at the University of Keele for research and development in Data and Knowledge Engineering (DAKE). The Centre draws most of its strength from the Department of Computer Science which also provides administrative support for the activities of the Centre, although its membership is spread over several departments. The Centre has three main streams of research activities, namely: Large Knowledge Bases Software Engineering Neural Networks The Large Knowledge Base group, which provided the focus for this conference, is active in a number of research areas relating to data and knowledge bases, spanning from distributed databases to cooperations among data and knowledge bases. The current research topics include integration of data and knowledge bases and coopera ting knowledge based systems, with several major projects in the latter (see the entries under the Poster Session given below)."

The book describes the rise of science (and technology) in the Islamic Golden Age, examines the causes that led to its decline, reviews failed later attempts for its revival and finally discusses social and religious reformation needed for it to flourish in contemporary Muslim societies. Social reformation covers rule of law, democratic infra-structure and human-rights, while religious reformation involves the reinterpretation of scripture. It is argued that without such a social and religious reformation, Muslims (a quarter of the earth's population) will be less able to participate in the science-driven 21st century world. Muslim leaders in the UK and elsewhere are not addressing the need of such an essential reformation, without which, Muslims as a people will remain in a limbo and thus continue to be vulnerable to extremist ideas. Therefore this book should be a must for all those interested in the creation of a harmonious one-world.