Matteo Baldoni (baldoni [at] di [dot] unito [dot] it)
URL: http://www.di.unito.it/~baldoni

Cristina Baroglio (baroglio [at] di [dot] unito [dot] it
URL: http://www.di.unito.it/~baroglio/main1.html

Viviana Mascardi (mascardi [at] disi [dot] unige [dot] it)
URL: http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/index.html

The realisation of distributed, open, dynamic, and heterogeneous software systems is a challenge that involves many facets, from formal theories to software engineering and practical applications. Scientists in various research areas are attacking this problem from different perspectives.

In particular, in the last years service-oriented software technologies, and especially Web Services, have been gaining popularity, becoming a leading paradigm in the development of IT solutions. The current web service technology, however, does not yet supply valid methodologies for developing cross-enterprise systems which require complex interactions among the parties nor it supports the automatic retrieval and composition of web services as well as desired. These issues, actually, demand for semantic descriptions and for a formal representation of organizational aspects that are at the heart of research in other fields, such as Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and Ontologies, where the concepts of autonomy, proactivity, heterogeneity, interaction, inference, flexibility, semantic matching have a central role.

Each of the mentioned research fields has its specific competencies, among them:

• 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.
• 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.

This Special Issue attempts to collect and compare such diverse experiences with the aim of fostering cross-fertilization. It is not necessary that the submitted works tackle all of the mentioned aspects, but emphasis on inter-connections between the fields will be appreciated.

This Special Issue is a follow-up of the MALLOW-AWESOME'007 workshop, held at Durham, UK in September 2007 (http://awesome007.disi.unige.it), which has provided a discussion forum for researchers working on Agents, Web Services, and Ontologies. 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 and that will be submitted by answering to this call.

Topics of interest are all those concerned with integrated and/or cross-field approaches for engineering Agents, Web Services, Ontologies. They include, but are not limited to:

• Semantic Web Agents and Semantic Web Services
• Integrated Methodologies, Notations, Infrastructures for Agents, WSs, Ontologies
• Enhancement of communication among Agents/WSs by means of Ontologies
• Formal aspects for Agents, WSs and Ontologies
• Service-Oriented Multiagent systems
• Implementing agents with WS technologies
• Agent-inspired Declarative Approaches to WSs or SOA
• Exploiting AOSE for engineering WSs and Ontologies
• Orchestrations, choreographies, and Interaction Protocols: languages, theory and practice
• Formal Description of contracts and negotiation policies
• Tools for Semantic Web Services/Agents
• Applications of Semantic Web Services/Agents

Authors are requested to submit their manuscripts by email as PDF files to the Special Issue guest editors ( baldoni [at] di [dot] unito [dot] it, baroglio [at] di [dot] unito [dot] it, mascardi [at] disi [dot] unige [dot] it). Please, clearly state in the email message both the journal name and the special issue title.

If you mean to contribute to the special issue, please, send an email, containing tentative title, authors, short abstract, and keywords, to the guest editors as soon as possible (and no later than January, 15th, 2008).

Manuscripts must be formatted according to the guidelines that can be retrieved through the link http://www.iospress.nl/html/15741702.php .

Notice that paper submission is to be done by email to the guest editors and not by means of the IOS Press submission system, which can be used only for papers that are not to be included in a special issue.

Deadline for abstracts: January, 15th, 2008.
Deadline for submission: February, 20th, 2008
Deadline for review: March, 24th, 2008