Do virtual museums really provide added value to end-users, or do they just contribute to the abundance of images? Does the World Wide Web save endangered cultural heritage, or does it foster a society with less variety? These and other related questions are raised and answered in this book, the result of a long path across the digital heritage landscape. It provides a comprehensive view on issues and achievements in digital collections and cultural content.

Computational culture --eCulture-- has so far been considered as a set of more or less loose traits and phenomena that part of the humanity (those over 30 years old) does not try to understand ("it is too difficult to apprehend -- and besides, it works") while the other half, the younger ones, who were born inside this new culture, blanketed by it and who tend to think of it as "natural given", do not feel the urge to fully understand, neither. "Virtual reality gives me this, the algorithms give me that, what else there is to it?" eCulture, however, has become dense and rich enough to be considered as a language, with its units of meaning -- both at the level of its visible figures or significants and at the level of the meaning each one of them conveys. It is a language just as film and English are languages. If humanity does not break the code of this language as an overall and comprehensive tool to represent the world, therefore failing to use it according to its own will and needs, this new language will speak the human being, will express itself through the human being, instead of being spoken by humanity. This book suggests the way to consider eCulture as a language and chooses as an instrument of analysis a convergence between the Humanities (philosophy, arts and culture) and the "hard sciences".

Over the past three decades, software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding of the characteristics of complexity in software. It is now widely recognised thatinteraction is probably the most important single char- teristic of complex software. Software architectures that contain many dyna- cally interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and eng- ing in complex coordination protocols, are typically orders of magnitude more complex to correctly and e?ciently engineer than those that simply compute a function of some input through a single thread of control. Unfortunately, it turns out that many (if not most) real-world applications have precisely these characteristics. As a consequence, a major research topic in c- puter science over at least the past two decades has been the development of tools and techniques to model, understand, and implement systems in which interaction is the norm. Indeed, many researchers now believe that in future computation itself will be understood as chie?y a process of interaction.

This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2005. The 18 revised full papers were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling tools, analysis and validation tools, multiagent systems design, implementation tools, and experiences and comparative evaluations.

There are three main drivers of human progress: fear of death, new toys, and telling tales. The fear of death makes us look for extended spaces of human activity and bridges over spans of inexistence. Virtual space created by the electronically supported web supply such infinity to our kind. The fast-growing twenty-first century is still a time of technology, and humankind look like kids playing at the gates where routes through time start. And still we are keen on telling our individual tales lest they might fail to get in their niche of extended existence. In our passionate impatience to reach infinity of the race, humankind is turning into e-kind. It takes up the vast spaces of virtuality, making itself free from material and spiritual cargo, at the same time being dependent on both material and ideal modes of existence. The author has been on the track of active philosophy for the late thirty years or, to put it in a metaphoric way, in the misty grounds of teaching young people of a dying country how to survive in a fast-changing environment. The name chosen for misty people in a misty space is e-kind. The book is the authors report about her experience with growing e-kind. The approach to knowing is called SIAN (systematic, integrated approach to the net), and the general field of this type of philosophizing thus is fixed as belonging to the philosophy of the infosphere.

Linguæ & is a peer-reviewed journal which provides a new outlet for interdisciplinary research on language and literature, giving voice to a cross-cultural and multi-genre koine. While the idea for the journal was developed in the ambit of the post-graduate programme in European Intercultural Studies at the University of Urbino, Italy, its scope goes far beyond that of exploring pre-established cultural paradigms. Indeed, its strongly experimental and dialogic approach to the ongoing debate should serve as encouragement for the submission of new work by young researchers.