Proceedings of a March 1999 workshop, focusing on information technology for virtual enterprises. Papers are organized in sections on virtual enterprise modeling and analysis, information management in virtual enterprises, communication and negotiation in virtual enterprises, invited project present

Provides a comprehensive review of the most recent advances in agent and Web service technologies. Provides an integrated view of the most recent contributions that support formation, integration, collaboration, and operation in virtual enterprise. Presents examples of applications of these technologies throughout various aspects of the virtual enterprise life cycle.

The fast progress in computer networks and their wide availability complemented with on one hand the "explosion" of the mobile computing and on the other hand the trends in the direction of ubiquitous computing, act as powerful enablers for new forms of highly dynamic collaborative organizations and emergence of new business practices. The first efforts in virtual enterprises (VE) were strongly constrained by the need to design and develop horizontal infrastructures aimed at supporting the basic collaboration needs of consortia of enterprises. Even pilot projects that were focused on specific business domains were forced to first develop some basic infrastructures before being able to develop their specific business models. Nowadays, although there is still a need to consolidate and standardize the horizontal infrastructures, the focus is more and more directed to the development of new vertical business models and the corresponding support tools. At the same time, in the earlier R&D projects, the attention was almost exclusively devoted to the operation phase of the VE life cycle, while now there are more activities addressing the creation phase, developing mechanisms to support the rapid formation of new virtual organizations for new business opportunities. In order to complete the life cycle, there is a need to also invest on support for VE dissolution.

Papers from a June 2002 workshop identify and explore technical and technology management issues surrounding e-commerce for the Internet. Papers are grouped in sections on WebServices and XML-based protocols, business processes and workflow technology, e-markets, Internet infrastructure, wireless infrastructure and the Web, and e- commerce applications. Some applications and methods discussed include pricing of bundled information goods, a secure protocol for disseminating data to subscribers via IP multicast, clustering Web accelerators, and dynamic refinement of table summarization for m- commerce. Other topics are mediator systems in e-commerce applications, MQML-message queuing markup language, and characterization of e-commerce traffic. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.