This issue of SIGecom Exchanges includes five papers.

The first paper studies the "choreography" of business collaborations. Two standards have emerged for implementing business partnerships: ebXML and Web Services. In this paper, the authors argue that these two standards are not competitors, but rather, they can co-exist so long as the former can be automatically transformed into the latter. Towards this end, the authors develop one such transformation.

The second paper focuses on construction of negotiation protocols for e-commerce applications with the following desired properties: (a) an underlying formal semantics; (b) compositionality; and (c) dynamic reconfigurability. This paper demonstrates that one can specify and implement negotiation protocols possessing these properties.

The third paper is concerned with mining navigation patterns, or link travesal patterns, in Web usage data. The authors note that most existing work in this area ignores temporal trends; consequently, they propose a time-series-based model of navigational patterns. This representation facilitates the application of a rich array of data analysis techniques.

The fourth paper deals with open systems for B2B e-commerce. The author argues that we can further progress on open systems for B2B e-commerce by developing and deploying specialized ontologies that help automate business transactions.

The final paper is a position paper on grid computing. Efficient reource allocation and management is undoubtedly a complex undertaking in a computational grid. This paper argues that software agents, particularly e-negotiation agents, can play a key role in realizing the vision of grid computing.

Enjoy,