During the last decade, knowledge engineering methodologies and tools have contributed to eliciting expertise, organizing it into a computational structure in order to support the development of computer applications in different fields. In the network-based information society, the multi-agent scenario emerges naturally and new requirements for applications development are imposed. In these early 2000s the agent-based technologies are growing up to be a new software engineering paradigm that assists the design of real-domain applications and they have started to migrate from research laboratories to the software industry. This volume focuses on the development of distributed knowledge-based applications. The main aim is to provide a detailed account of the role of Knowledge Engineering and Agent Technology (KEAT) with respect to state-of-the-art, various applications and future perspectives, attractive enough both for software professionals and researchers in this dynamic field of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science.
