Agent technology has recently become one of the most vibrant and fastest growing areas in information technology. Eighteen coherently written chapters by leading authorities provide complementary coverage of the relevant issues organized in four parts: cooperative information systems and agents;

I. Cooperative Information Systems and Agents.- 1. From Business Processes to Cooperative Information Systems: An Information Agents Perspective.- 2. Social Abstractions for Information Agents.- 3. Integration of Information from Multiple Sources of Textual Data.- 4. In-Context Information Management through Adaptive Collaboration of Intelligent Agents.- 5. A Framework for a Scalable Agent Architecture of Cooperating Heterogeneous Knowledge Sources.- II. Rational Information Agents and Electronic Commerce.- 6. Agents as Mediators in Electronic Commerce.- 7. Auctions and Multi-agent Systems.- 8. Strategic Reasoning and Adaptation in an Information Economy.- 9. SharedPlans in Electronic Commerce.- 10. Dynamic Supply Chain Structuring for Electronic Commerce Among Agents.- III. Adaptive Information Agents.- 11. Adaptive Choice of Information Sources.- 12. Personal Assistants for the Web: A MIT Perspective.- 13. Amalthaea and Histos: MultiAgent Systems for WWW Sites and Reputation Recommendations.- 14. Scalable Web Search by Adaptive Online Agents: An InfoSpiders Case Study.- IV. Mobile Information Agents and Security.- 15. Mobile Agents for Distributed Information Retrieval.- 16. On Coordinating Information Agents and Mobility.- 17. Spawning Information Agents on the Web.- 18. Mobile Agent Security.- References.- About the Authors.- List of Contributors.

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