Over the past few years it has become clear that the Internet will play an ever greater role in the distribution of digital content. Specialised portable hardware, designed to give ubiquitous access to traditional media such as books, music, or video, will make digital content in all its forms available to broad sectors of the population. Businesses which have adapted their marketing and distribution strategies to this new environment will find themselves with a major competitive advantage world-wide.

SimWeb, a research project funded by the European Union to explore innovative eBusiness models using agent simulation is intended to provide European businesses in the digital content sector with insights and tools that will allow them to take informed business strategy decisions and become more competitive by adapting their traditional business models to a new and demanding reality. SimWeb intends to accomplish this objective by developing business sector models based on innovative, reusable, and highly scalable multi-agent simulation technology. These computer-based models, calibrated to market data extracted from extensive sector surveys, will allow market participants in the digital content sector to run through a wide variety of social and economic scenarios and observe the impact of their decisions on their businesses in particular, and on the competitive digital content landscape in general. Using scenario simulations, businesses will gain invaluable insights and understanding of the hitherto unexplored dynamics of the market, and allow them to adjust their own business models to changing demands. Making extensive use of exploratory games, SimWeb will help non-technical and business- focused users to learn from the results of the simulations.

SimWeb has now been underway for about a year and we have made significant headway in terms of both the sector surveys and model prototype developments. In this workshop, we explore through a series of presentations and panel-mediated discussions the current state of the SimWeb project and its future directions. Issues which will be addressed during the workshop include:

The workshop is intended to act as a forum for both discussion and evaluation of this innovative research project. Multi-agent simulation as a method of providing strategic assistance to SMEs in the digital contents sector is still highly controversial. The SimWeb group has been both praised and criticised for taking this new and still poorly understood approach - and we are looking for real marketplace responses to our work.

The workshop will attract practitioners in the on-line contents markets by offering a mix of sector and project presentations, panel discussion, and hands-on demonstration of the first model prototypes. The panel will discuss a set of questions and issues which can be submitted by the audience prior to the event. The half-day (preferably afternoon) session is structured along the following lines:

After the panel discussion, participants in the event can attend a prototype demo session organised by the Univ. of Surrey and iSOCO/CIMNE.