Issues in agent-based software engineering -- A database perspective to a cooperation environment -- Extraction of informations from highly heterogeneous source of textual data -- Cases, information, and agents -- Knowledge rovers: Cooperative intelligent agent support for enterprise information architectures -- The CORBA specification for cooperation in heterogeneous information systems -- Enriching active databases with agent technology -- Result sharing among agents using reactive rules -- Metadatabase meets distributed AI -- A reactive logical agent -- Neural fuzzy agents for database search -- ‘Learning’ based filtering of text information using simple interest profiles -- An organized society of autonomous knowledge discovery agents -- Cooperative Information Agents and communication -- Achieving efficient cooperation in a multi-agent system: the twin-base modeling -- Approaching interoperability for heterogenous multiagent systems using high order agencies -- Ascription of intensional ontologies in anthropological descriptions of Multi-Agent Systems -- Interoperability of distributed and heterogeneous systems based on software agent-oriented frameworks -- An architecture for transparent access to semantically heterogeneous information sources -- Multi-level security in multiagent systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents - DAI Meets Databases, CIA-97, held in Kiel, Germany, in February 1997. The book opens with 6 invited full papers by internationally leading researchers surveying the state of the art in the area. The 16 revised full research papers presented were carefully selected during a highly competitive round of reviewing. The papers are organized in topical sections on databases and agent technology, agents for database search and knowledge discovery, communication and cooperation among information agents, and agent-based access to heterogeneous information sources.