This comprehensive text explains the principles and practice of Web services and relates all concepts to practical examples and emerging standards.  Its discussions include: Ontologies Semantic web technologies Peer-to-peer service discovery Service selection Web structure and link analysis Distributed transactions Process modelling Consistency management.  The application of these technologies is clearly explained within the context of planning, negotiation, contracts, compliance, privacy, and network policies. The presentation of the intellectual underpinnings of Web services draws from several key disciplines such as databases, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems for techniques and formalisms.  Ideas from these disciplines are united in the context of Web services and service-based applications.  Featuring an accompanying website and teacher’s manual that includes a complete set of transparencies for lectures, copies of open-source software for exercises and working implementations, and resources to conduct course projects, this book makes an excellent graduate textbook.  It will also prove an invaluable reference and training tool for practitioners.

Product Description: Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, Morpheus, Kaza, and several others. In P2P systems, a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services...read more

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Product Description: The world of agents comprises a broad range of intelligent programs that perform specific tasks on behalf of their users. Agents are distinguished from other types of software by their status as independent entities capable of completing complex assignments without intervention, rather than as tools that must be manipulated by a user...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This text on the subject of database and information systems, focuses on interoperable and co-operative systems. It is designed for researchers, professors, practitioners, students and other computing professionals." (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Distributed computing is of great significance in current and future reserach and applications of computer science. As a consequence, in artificial intelligence we can observe rapid growth in the subfield of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI)...read more