Agent technology is one of the most vibrant and active areas of research and development in information technology. Multi-agents and mobile agent technologies are making significant impacts upon almost all aspects of computing discipline. Boldly speaking, they are underpinning the profound changes taking place in our information society. One of the admittedly most successful applications is in global business partnerships, directly due to the nature of the problem. In fact, virtual organizations and e-commerce have become fashionable practices of today's global businesses. At the right time, agents act as key components in the Internet-wide information and e-commerce systems that are currently being developed across the globe, and multi-agents and mobile agents provide most feasible and effective computational frameworks for contemporary business practices. Wireless communication and Mobile networking technology has been received much attention in the last decade. In particular, wireless sensor networks, Bluetooth networks, and wireless ad-hoc networks are deemed as the next generation mobile systems. Research in these systems is emergent and crucial, not only in academic and research community, but also in industrial field. In this decade, the Web service researches are very popular. This special issue focuses on the state-of-the-art software technology related to these issues, including multimedia networking, agent technology, web services, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Information Systems Development, Data Mining, Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing .Ten papers are included in this special issue.

  In the first paper entitled “An Intelligent Home Environment based on Service Planning over Peer-to- Peer Overlay Network”, Dr. Chuan-Feng Chiu, Dr. Steen J. Hsu, and Dr. Sen-Ren Jan discussed a middleware to realize smart home environment over peer-to-peer overlay network to resolve the heterogeneous home environment problem and propose the service collaboration framework to use home services intelligently...