Describing the technologies to combine language resources flexibly as web services, this book provides valuable case studies for those who work in services computing, language resources, human–computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and service science. The authors have been operating the Language Grid, which wraps existing language resources as atomic language services and enables users to compose new services by combining them. From architecture level to service composition level, the book explains how to resolve infrastructural and operational difficulties in sharing and combining language resources, including interoperability of language service infrastructures, various types of language service policies, human services, and service failures. The research based on the authors’ operating experiences of handling complicated issues such as intellectual property and interoperability of language resources contributes to exploitation of language resources as a service. On the other hand, both the analysis based on using services and the design of new services can bring significant results. A new style of multilingual communication supported by language services is worthy of analysis in HCI/CSCW, and the design process of language services is the focus of valuable case studies in service science. By using language resources in different ways based on the Language Grid, many activities are highly regarded by diverse communities. This book consists of four parts: (1) two types of language service platforms to interconnect language services across service grids, (2) various language service composition technologies that improve the reusability, efficiency, and accuracy of composite services, (3) research work and activities in creating language resources and services, and (4) various applications and tools for understanding and designing language services that well support intercultural collaboration.

This book contains revised selected and invited papers presented at the International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems, MMAS 2018, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in July 2018. The 7 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. Also included are 3 post-workshop papers. The papers discuss enabling technologies, new architectures, promising applications, and challenges of massively multi-agent systems in the era of IoT. They are organized in the following topical sections: multi-agent systems and Internet of Things; architectures for massively multi-agent systems; and applications of massively multi-agent systems.

There is increasing interaction among communities with multiple languages, thus we need services that can effectively support multilingual communication. The Language Grid is an initiative to build an infrastructure that allows end users to create composite language services for intercultural collaboration. The aim is to support communities to create customized multilingual environments by using language services to overcome local language barriers. The stakeholders of the Language Grid are the language resource providers, the language service users, and the language grid operators who coordinate the former. This book includes 18 chapters in six parts that summarize various research results and associated development activities on the Language Grid. The chapters in Part I describe the framework of the Language Grid, i.e., service-oriented collective intelligence, used to bridge providers, users and operators. Two kinds of software are introduced, the service grid server software and the Language Grid Toolbox, and code for both is available via open source licenses. Part II describes technologies for service workflows that compose atomic language services. Part III reports on research work and activities relating to sharing and using language services. Part IV describes various applications of language services as applicable to intercultural collaboration. Part V contains reports on applying the Language Grid for translation activities, including localization of industrial documents and Wikipedia articles. Finally, Part VI illustrates how the Language Grid can be connected to other service grids, such as DFKI's Heart of Gold and smart classroom services in Tsinghua University in Beijing. The book will be valuable for researchers in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, services computing and human--computer interaction, particularly those who are interested in bridging technologies and user communities.

This book is a festschrift in honour of Mike Papazoglou’s 65th birthday and retirement. It includes 20 contributions from leading researchers who have worked with Mike in his more than 40 years of academic research. Topics are as varied as Mike’s and include service engineering, service management, services and human, IoT, and data-driven services.

This book bridges the gap between Business and IT services and proposes an original life-cycle view of the modern service industry. Major solution architectures, technologies and research methods are discussed in the lifecycle of services innovation research. The book provides readers with new research and solution methods to enable IT services and computing technology to better create and manage business services, which is the goal of Services Computing.

This book constitutes the refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Worldwide Language Service Infrastructure, WLSI 2015, held in Kyoto, Japan, in January 2015. The 4 full papers included in this volume and presented together with 2 short papers and 8 invited papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 7 submissions. The papers are categorized into four parts: introducing metadata and annotations; providing technologies for language service platforms; atomic language services across different interfaces, policies, and development of language resources and services; and collecting reports on language service application.