Maria E. Orlowska - Böcker

This volume contains papers presented during the science trace at the 3rd International Conference of Business Information Systems, BIS 9, held in Poznan, Poland, 14-16 April 1999, which discussed the development, implementation, applications and improvement of computer systems for business processes. The papers deal with practical, industry experiences and validated prototype implementations, and cover areas such as Decision Support, Workflow Management, Data Warehousing, Business Process Re-engineering. The authors are well-known, and include Klaus R. Dittrich, Johann Eder, Gary Klein, Peter C. Lockemann, Heinrich C. Mayr, August-Wilhelm Scheer and Robert Winter.

This volume contains papers presented during the science trace at the 4th International Conference of Business Information Systems, BIS 2000, held in Poznan, Poland, 12-13 April 2000, which discussed the development, implementation, applications and improvement of computer systems for business processes.The papers deal with practical, industry experiences and validated prototype implementations, and cover areas such as integration of information systems, electronic transactions and banking, virtual organisations, network technologies, business information systems modelling and analysis.

The Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was heldMay27-28,2002inconjunctionwithCAiSE02,the14thInternationalC- ferenceonAdvancedInformationSystemsEngineering.Theworkshopcomprised three tracks: a track on Web services co-chaired by Barbara Pernici (Politecnico di Milano) and Jian Yang (Tilburg University); a track on e-business, co-chaired byMariaE.Orlowska(UniversityofQueensland)andChristophBussler(Oracle Corporation, USA); and a track on e-services and the Semantic Web, co-chaired byRickHull(BellLaboratories,LucentTechnologies,USA)andSheilaMcIlraith (Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, USA). The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the web to deliver their goods and services, to ?nd trading partners, and to link theirexisting(maybelegacy)applicationstootherapplications.Webservicesare rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed c- putation and application framework.On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting so- ware applications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accu- lated that demonstrates the di?erence between just having an online presence andusingtheWebasastrategicandfunctionalmediumine-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as in marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifactstoenableautomatedreasoningaboutthem.Whenappliedtoe-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.

Thepapersinthisvolumewerepresentedatthe5thAsiaPaci?cWebConference (APWeb 2003), which was held in Xi'an, China during 23-25 April 2003. The World Wide Web has dramatically changed our ways of working, le- ning,entertaininganddoingbusinessinthelast10years. TheAsiaPaci?cregion has emerged in recent years as the fastest growing region in the world in the use of Web technologies as well as in making signi?cant contributions to WWW research and development. APWeb this year received 136 submissions from 21 countries and regions, including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, F- land, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, and USA. Each subm- sion was carefully reviewed by three members of the Program Committee. Only 39 regular papers and 16 short papers were accepted. While XML-related te- nologies continued to dominate at this year's APWeb conference, this volume - vealssomeemergingtrends,suchastheformalfoundationsofWebdatamana- ment, architectures and methodologies in Web information systems engineering, Web-based work?ow management systems, and the applications of data mining and distributed data management techniques in the new context of the Web.Also included in this volume are two high-quality papers from leading research groups on the topic of web mining (organized by Wen-Ying Ma of Microsoft - searchAsia). OnehighlightofAPWeb2003wasitshigh-pro?lekeynotespeakers, Marek Rusinkiewicz (Telcordia Technologies, USA), Minoru Etoh (NTT DoCoMo USA Labs) and Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore). Two keynote papers are included here. The conference received ?nancial support from Microsoft, Netec and a n- ber of Xi'an software industry and government agencies.

WelcometotheproceedingsoftheinauguralInternationalConferenceonService- Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2003). This was the ?rst of a series of events that willevolveoverthecomingyears,andwewerehappytoholdtheeventinTrento, where the idea for this conference was born. Trento is a lovely city with many Renaissance buildings, testimony to its great medieval past, and has a bustling modern university ready to master the future. The participants visited Trento at the beginning of the winter season, with excellent opportunities for skiing and hiking. The city o?ers many other tourist attractions, some of which, we hope, the participants took the opportunity to enjoy. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is the new emerging paradigm for d- tributed computing and e-business processing which has evolved from obje- oriented and component computing to one that enables us to build agile n- works of collaborating business applications distributed within and across or- nizational boundaries. ICSOC aims to become the ?agship conference in the area of service-oriented computing,whichisattractingmoreandmoreresearchersandpractitionersfrom both academia and industry.The beginnings are extremely promising, beyond our most optimistic expectations. We were deluged by requests for further inf- mation from all parts of the world and by a very high number of submissions. In fact, the success of a conference depends on the quality of the papers and on the organizational e?orts of the conference o?cers and secretariat. On the research side, exciting new areas in service computing, including service modeling, composition, business transactions and collaborations, service developmentandmanagement,P2PandGridcomputing,mobilecomputing,and security, were reported in the conference, in conjunction with keynote addresses and informative tutorials o?ered by leaders in the ?eld.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web, WES 2003, held in June 2003 in conjunction with CAiSE 2003.The 10 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited contributions were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers address the following topics: enterprise application integration, ontologies and the semantic Web, meta-workflows, workflow systems, e-services, semantic Web queries, e-markets, electronic service contracts, context modeling for Web information systems, Web service middleware, Web service offerings language, WSOL, Web service description, Web service composition, and Web service coordination.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2004, held in Brisbane, Australia in November 2004.The 45 revised full papers and 29 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 198 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Web information modeling; payment and security; information extraction; advanced applications; performance issues; linkage analysis and document clustering; Web caching and content analysis; XML query processing; Web search and personalization; workflow management and enterprise information systems; business processes; deep Web and dynamic content; Web information systems design; ontologies and applicatoins; multimedia, user interfaces, and languages; and peer-to-peer and grid systems.

The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide. The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

The papers presented here highlight the contributions of leading researchers in the field who are working with object-oriented technology, theory and practice. Among the topics to be covered are: object-rational data technology; distributed object computing, patterns and frameworks; concepts and methodologies; multimedia systems; object-oriented metrics; object reuse; object ontologies; business process re-design; knowledge management; object database management systems; and interoperability issues. Areas of significant interest to industry, especially in providing innovative directions for the development of next generation systems are also covered.