EXTENDING WEB SERVICES TECHNOLOGIES addresses the rapidly growing impact of Multi-Agent Systems on Web Services tools and techniques by presenting recent and significant developments in the general areas of Web services and software agents. In particular, the book addresses the potential for techniques from Multi-Agent Systems R&D 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 of this volume evolved from a workshop on Web services and agent-based engineering. In addition to the extended workshop papers, the book contains additional contributions written by leading international researchers and professionals from both the Web Services and Multi-Agent Systems community. Topics include:

Technologies for Business-Driven Information Technology Management

Service-Oriented Computing and Software Agents

OWL-S and Agent-Based Systems

A Broker for OWL-S Web Services

Agent-Based Web Services for Interoperability with the Web-Centric Enterprise

KAoS Semantic Policy and Domain Services

Agent-Based Support for Service Composition

Quality-of-Service Based Grid Communities

Enabling Flexible Interaction with Web Services

Composing Workflows of Semantic Web Services

Composing Web Services using an Agent Factory

Brokerage for Mathematical Services in MONET

Utilizing Web Services in an Agent Based Transaction Model

On Building Robust Web Service-Based Applications