Vijayan Sugumaran is a Professor of Management Information Systems in the Department of Decision and Information Sciences at Oakland University (Rochester, MI). Dr. Sugumaran received his BTech in mining engineering from the Indian School of Mines, MS in mining engineering from the University of Alaska � Fairbanks, and PhD in information technology from George Mason University. His research interests are in the areas of intelligent agent and multi-agent systems, component based software development and reuse, ontologies, Semantic Web and Web services, and internet technologies.