Boualem Benatallah & Lawrence Cavedon 
Extending Web Services Technologies [PDF ebook] 
The Use of Multi-Agent Approaches

Extending Web Services Technologies addresses the rapidly growing impact of Multi-Agent Systems on web services tools and techniques. In particular, the book addresses the potential for MAS techniques to impact the difficult challenges that must be tackled for web services technology to realize its promises. The area of web services offers the multi-agent community exciting research possibilities, including similarities in system architectures, powerful tools, and a focus on issues such as trust and reliability. Likewise, techniques developed in the multi-agent research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast growing technology. The contents contain contributions by leading international researchers and professionals from both the web services and Multi-Agent Systems community. Topics include semantic web services and associated standards, architectures integrating agents and services, transactions, authorization, and service composition.