Information and Software Technology 48 (2006) 355–356 www.elsevier.com/locate/infsof
Editorial
Special Issue Editorial: WAMIS 2005 Workshop Web and mobile computing technologies play an important role in our day-to-day life and are widely employed in various disciplines including education, science, commerce, and entertainment. These technologies provide solutions to access and process large scale information in a ubiquitous way. The aim of this workshop series is to provide a venue, for researchers from industry and academic, in order to discuss the challenges, to develop new solutions, and to explore new research directions in the web and mobile information systems. The international workshop on Web and Mobile Information Systems (WAMIS) was held in March 2005 in Taipei, Taiwan, in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA). The workshop attracted papers from academic and industry research community from all over the world. We have accepted 18 papers for presentations. We invited authors of 10 papers to submit extended versions of their papers for a special issue of Information and Software Technology. Submitted papers were reviewed by three independent reviewers. Based on the reviews, seven papers were accepted for publication in the special issue. The work presented in these papers is summarised as follows. Vincent et al. investigated the prediction of user behaviour patterns in mobile web systems. The aim is to help users to efficiently find the required services (e.g. information on hotels), and to improve the system performance. The authors proposed a new data mining technique that discovers users’ movement patterns which are associated with the requested sources. They presented experimental results which show that the proposed technique improves system performance and also increases the accuracy of discovering the required services. XML is widely used for data representation in Web applications. The paper authored by Pardede et al. explored the issue of storing complex XML data in data repositories such as relational, object-oriented or object-relational databases. This paper exploits the capabilities of object-relational database (ORDB) for effectively storing XML data. It presented new methodologies that store XML data into new ORDB data structures. Their contributions include the exploitation of ORBD features and the preservation of the conceptual semantics of XML data. 0950-5849/$ - see front matter q 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2005.12.018
Agent technology appears to be a promising approach to address the challenges of modern Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), influenced enormously by advanced information and internet technologies. Shakshuki et al. proposed software agent framework for Federated Collaborative Virtual Workspace (FCVW) based on Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) techniques. FCVW is an extension of MITRE’s Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW). This work presented the development process of the framework and provided an easy way with minimum complexity of creating agents in FCVW. Quality of service is crucial for the successful operation of mobile e-commerce systems. Awan et al. investigated the performance aspects of e-commerce systems in mobile environment. The work presented in this paper considers the movement of users between different network operators (or cells) during the processing of e-commerce requests. It presented a new approach which improves the performance of such requests and also provides them with seamless connection when moving from one cell into another. Semantic web has attracted significant attention from research community. One of the research issues is the information visualization given the large scale and complex information structure of the semantic web. Chen et al. presented an integrated semantic web interactive visualization environment (ISWIVE) in order to clearly represent the detailed resource descriptions as well as the overall topic relationships. The paper also provided a clearer visualization layout and facilitates the concurrent display of RDF and Topic Maps views. The paper authored by Huang et al. addresses the issue of web services discovery. Web services, which are openly available on the web, provide a paradigm for developing and aggregating distributed and heterogeneous software systems. This paper presented a moderated fuzzy web service discovery method that achieves a common consensus on the distinct opinions and expectations of service consumers and providers regarding the QoS of web services. This consensus-based method effectively discovers the desired web services with greater accuracy. Ensuring security in multimodal applications is more complicated than the traditional Internet applications. Chang et al. developed a multimodal web system (MWS) in order to provide a secure interactive voice channel. The system also supports the generation of multimodal user-interface page
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Editorial / Information and Software Technology 48 (2006) 355–356
using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.
Wolfville, NS, Canada E-mail address:
[email protected]
Muhammad Younas* Department of Computing, Oxford Brookes University, Wheatley Campus, Oxford OX33 1HX, UK E-mail address:
[email protected]
Kuo-Ming Chao Department of Computer and Network Systems, Coventry University, Coventry, UK E-mail address:
[email protected]
Elhadi Shakshuki Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University,
Received 11 November 2005; Accepted 2 December 2005 Available online 18 January 2006
* Corresponding author. Tel.: C44 1865 484572.
