Abstract—This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The roles of agents in B2B e-commerce are discussed through the business-to-business transaction model that identifies agents as being employed in partnership formation, brokering, and negotiation. Having identified the roles for agents in B2C and B2B e-commerce, some of the key underpinning technologies of this vision are highlighted. Finally, we conclude by discussing the future directions and potential impediments to the wide-scale adoption of agent-mediated e-commerce. Index Terms—Agent-mediated electronic commerce, intelligent agents. 1

Abstract. Large-scale, dynamic and open environments such as the Grid and Web Services build upon existing computing infrastructures to supply dependable and consistent large-scale computational systems. This kind of architecture has been adopted by those working with business and scientific information systems allowing them to exploit extensive and diverse computing resources to perform complex data processing tasks. In such systems, results are often derived by composing multiple, geographically distributed, heterogeneous services as specified by intricate workflow management. This leads to the undesirable situation where the results are known, but the means by which they were achieved is not. With both scientific experiments and business transactions, the notion of lineage and dataset derivation is of paramount importance since without it, information is potentially worthless. We address the issue of data provenance, the description of the origin of a piece of data, in these environments showing the requirements, uses and implementation difficulties. We propose an infrastructure level support for a provenance recording capability for service-oriented architectures such as the Grid and Web Services. We also offer services to view and retrieve provenance and we provide a mechanism by which provenance is used to determine whether previous computed results are still up to date. 1

The Web Services world consists of loosely-coupled distributed systems which adapt to changes by the use of service descriptions that enable ad-hoc, opportunistic service discovery and reuse. At present, these service descriptions are semantically impoverished, being concerned with describing the functional signature of the services rather than characterising their meaning. In the Semantic Web community, the DAML Services effort attempts to rectify this by providing a more expressive way of describing Web Services using ontologies. However, this approach does not separate the domain-neutral communicative intent of a message (considered in terms of speech acts) from its domain-specific content, unlike similar developments from the multi-agent systems community. We describe our experiences of designing and building an ontologically motivated Web Services system for situational awareness and information triage in a simulated humanitarian aid scenario. In particular, we discuss the merits of using techniques from the multi-agent systems community for separating the intentional force of messages from their content, and the implementation of these techniques within the DAML Services model.

In this paper we describe the evolution of grid systems, identifying three generations: first generation systems which were the forerunners of the Grid as we recognise it today; second generation systems with a focus on middleware to support large scale data and computation; and third generation systems where the emphasis shifts to distributed global collaboration, a service oriented approach and information layer issues. In particular, we discuss the relationship between the Grid and the World Wide Web, and suggest that evolving web technologies will provide the basis for the next generation of the Grid. The latter aspect – which we define as the Semantic Grid – is explored in a companion paper. 1.

The Grid is an integrated infrastructure for coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in distributed environments. The effective and efficient use of stored data and its transformation into information and knowledge will be a main driver in Grid evolution. The use of ontologies to describe Grid resources will simplify and structure the systematic building of Grid applications through the composition and reuse of software components and the development of knowledge-based services and tools. The paper presents an ontology for the Data Mining domain that can be used to simplify the development of distributed knowledge discovery applications on the Grid, offering to a domain expert a reference model for the different kind of data mining tasks, methodologies and software available to solve a given problem, helping a user in finding the most appropriate solution. How the DAMON ontology is used to enhance the design of distributed data mining applications on the KNOWLEDGEGRID is also shown.

Evolving grid resources, tools, and applications offer a means of dealing intelligently with enormous quantities of data. The authors survey the field and propose a software architecture that integrates semantic modeling and knowledge discovery with grid technologies. E- S c i e n c e

Several innovative software applications such as those required by ambient intelligence, the semantic grid, e-commerce and e-marketing, can be viewed as open societies of heterogeneous and self-interested agents in which social order is achieved through norms. For agents to participate in these kinds of societies, it is enough that they are able to represent and fulfill norms, and to recognise the authority of certain agents. However, to voluntarily be part of a society or to voluntarily leave it, other characteristics of agents are needed. To find these characteristics we observe that on the one hand, autonomous agents have their own goals and, sometimes, they act on behalf of others whose goals must be satisfied. On the other, we observe that by being members, agents must comply with some norms that can be in clear conflict with their goals. Consequently, agents must evaluate the positive or negative effects of norms on their goals before making a decision concerning their social behaviour. Providing a model of autonomous agents that make this kind of norm reasoning is the aim of this paper. 1.

Grid technologies emerged in the early 1990s, built on existing Web protocols and offering large-scale resource sharing and high performance computation. This paper will show the advantages the Grid has over the Web, including how it integrates modern project techniques and architectures. The paper will finally forecast the evolution and predict the future usage of this developing technology.

Abstract. Many large semantic systems can be described as Semantic Grids of Semantic Grids with large amounts of relatively static services and associated semantic information combined with multiple dynamic regions (sessions or subgrids) where the semantic information is changing rapidly. We design a hybrid Information Service supporting both the scalability of large amounts of relatively slowly varying data and a high performance rapidly updated Information Service for dynamic regions. We use the two web service standards UDDI and WS-Context in our system. We report initial results from a prototype that is applied to sensor and collaboration grids. 1

Abstract. Recently, Web services have generated great interests in both vendors and researchers. Web services, based on existing Internet protocols and open standards, can provide a flexible solution to the problem of application integration. With the help of WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI, Web services are becoming popular in Web applications. However, the current Web services architectures are confronted with a few stubborn problems, for instance, security. In this paper, we shall give an overview of these problems. We believe that solving these problems will become crucial to success of Web services. In the end, we predict distinct advances in semantic Grid services.