Electronic-service ~e-service! intelligence is a new research field that deals with fundamental roles, social impacts, and practical applications of various intelligent technologies and methodologies on Internet-based e-services. It has been recently identified as a novel direction and a next stage of e-services for current and future development.
E-services involve various types, delivery systems, advanced information technologies, methodologies, and applications of online services that are provided by e-government, e-business, e-commerce, e-market, e-finance, and e-learning systems, to name a few. They thus offer great opportunities and challenges for many areas, such as government, business, commerce, marketing, finance, and education. E-service intelligence comes from real-world requirements, where many government and business organizations are nowadays developing their e-service systems with various intelligent functions. These organizations need to integrate various intelligent technologies and methodologies into their e-service systems for realizing intelligent online services for their users.
Over the past decade, in most developed countries both government and business online services have mainly gone through three stages: ~1! online information presentation, ~2! online transaction, and ~3! online information integration. As an example, we take the case of the development of the Australian e-government. At stage one ~1997-2000! the Australian government made information available online and provided simple groupware functionalities such as e-mail queries and