This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Engineering and Employment of Cooperative Information Systems, EDCIS 2002, held in Beijing, China, in September 2002. The 44 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. The papers are organized on topical sections on workflow, ontologies, semantic web, enterprise application integration, mobile agents, enterprise modelling, distributed systems, analysis, software engineering, architectures, transactions, coordination, and groupware.