A Special Issue of the Multiagent and Grid Systems International Journal, about "Agents, Web Services and Ontologies: Integrated Methodologies", is under preparation.

A selection of extended and revised works presented at the workshop will be considered for publication, together with new works, which have not been presented at MALLOW-AWESOME'007 and that will be submitted by answering to the call for papers.

Deadlines for submission to the SPECIAL ISSUE: 15 January 2008 (abstract); 20 February 2008 (full paper)

MALLOW-AWESOME'007 wants to stimulate discussion among researchers working on Agents, Web Services, and Ontologies, in order to help the identification and the definition of Methodologies for integrating them. The realisation of distributed, open, dynamic, and heterogeneous software systems is, in fact, a challenge that involves many facets, from formal theories to software engineering and practical applications. Scientists in various research areas, such as Semantic Web, Web Services, Agents, Ontologies, are attacking this problem from different perspectives. MALLOW-AWESOME'007 attempts to provide a discussion forum for collecting and comparing such diverse experiences with the aim of fostering cross fertilization.

MAS face the representation of distributed, open systems from an abstract point of view, supplying theories, methodologies, and tools for modelling systems of heterogeneous, interacting entities. Agent-Oriented Software Engineering studies how existing techniques can be adapted or extended in order to engineer this kind of complex distributed systems, and offers methodologies, notations, and techniques suitable for analysing, modelling, prototyping and finally implementing them following the "Multiagent System" metaphor.

On the other hand, Web Services provide an already available and widely accepted infrastructure for supporting interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network, allowing heterogeneous software applications written in various programming languages and running on various platforms both to expose themselves as WSs, and to use other WSs.

The need of sharing either a common, sophisticated conceptualisation of the application domain, or just a simple vocabulary, is more and more often addressed by means of Ontologies. Ontologies are a key technology both in the Agent-Oriented Software Engineering field, where they are used to make the exchange of meaningful information among autonomous entities possible, and in the Web Services field, where they represent the means for moving from Web Services to Semantic Web Services.