Bøger af Karl Aberer

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2006, held in Wuhan, China in October 2006. The 37 revised full papers and 17 revised short papers presented together with three invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 183 submissions.

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. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power and the storage capacity of the hosts composing the network, and because they realize a completely open decentralized environment where everybody can join in autonomously. Although researchers working on distributed computing, multiagent systems, databases, and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it is only recently that papers motivated by the current P2P paradigm have started appearing in high quality conferences and workshops. In particular, research on agent systems appears to be most relevant because multiagent systems have always been thought of as networks of autonomous peers since their inception. Agents, which can be superimposed on the P2P architecture, embody the description of task environments, decision-support capabilities, social behaviors, trust and reputation, and interaction protocols among peers. The emphasis on decentralization, autonomy, ease, and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages also leads to significant potential problems. Most prominent among these are coordination - the ability of an agent to make decisions on its own actions in the context of activities of other agents, and scalability - the value of the P2P systems in how well they self-organize so as to scale along several dimensions, including complexity, heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, etc.This book brings together an introduction, three invited articles, and revised versions of the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia, July 2003.

Peer-to-peer(P2P)computingiscurrentlyattractingenormousmediaattention, spurred by the popularity of ?le sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella and Morpheus. In P2P systems a very large number of autonomous computing nodes (the peers) pool together their resources and rely on each other for data and services. The wealth of business opportunities promised by P2P networks has gene- ted much industrial interest recently, and has resulted in the creation of various industrial projects, startup companies, and special interest groups. Researchers from distributed computing, networks, agents and databases have also become excited about the P2P vision, and papers tackling open problems in this area have started appearing in high-quality conferences and workshops. Much of the recent research on P2P systems seems to be carried out by - search groups with a primary interest in distributed computation and networks. This workshop concentrated on the impact that current database research can have on P2P computing and vice versa. Although researchers in distributed data structures and databases have been working on related issues for a long time, the developed techniques are simply not adequate for the new paradigm.

This book constitutes the ?rst volume of the ?rst journal in the new LNCS Jo- nalSubline,theJournalonDataSemantics. Publishingajournalinabookseries might come as a surprise to customers, readers, and librarians, thus we would like to provide some background information and our motivation for introducing this new LNCS subline. As a consequence of the very tight interaction between the Lecture Notes in ComputerScienceseriesandtheinternationalcomputerscienceresearchand- velopment community, we receive quite a few proposals for new archive journals. From the successful launch of workshops or conferences and publication of their proceedings in the LNCS series, it might seem like a natural step to approach the publisher about launching a journal once this speci?c ?eld has gained a c- tain level of maturity and stability. Each year we receive about a dozen such proposals and even more informal inquiries. Like other publishers, it has been our experience that launching a new jo- nal and making it a long-term success is a hard job nowadays, due to a generally di?cult market situation, and library budget restrictions in particular. Because many of the proceedings in LNCS, and especially many of the LNCS postp- ceedings, apply the same strict reviewing and selection criteria as established journals, we started discussing with proposers of new journals the alternative of devoting a few volumes in LNCS to their ?eld, instead of going through the painful Sisyphean adventure of establishing a new journal on its own.