Preface

Citation

Khalil, I. (2010), "Preface", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 6 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijwis.2010.36206daa.001

Preface

Article Type: Preface From: International Journal of Web Information Systems, Volume 6, Issue 4

This is the final issue of Volume 6 of the International Journal of Web Information Systems, which concludes the sixth year of this journal which has paved its way to be a premium journal providing researchers and academic communities around the world with the highest quality articles while reporting the state-of-the-art research results and scientific findings allowing students, developers, engineers, innovators, research strategists and IT managers in this field to gain greater insight into web information systems as they relate to applications, management and opportunities within any given construct. The coverage of these authoritative articles published in the last six years ranges from innovative topics to research findings to trends analysis on web information systems and related theories, technologies, methods, applications and services from all engineering, business and organizational perspectives.

In this issue, we have four papers. The first paper entitled “Topic-based web site summarization” By Yongzheng Zhang, Evangelos Milios and Nur Zincir-Heywood from the Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Canada addresses the problem of summarization of an entire web site with diverse content and presents a novel two-stage topic-based framework. The first stage identifies the main topics covered in a web site via clustering and the second stage summarizes each topic separately. The proposed system is evaluated by a user study, and compared with the single-topic summarization approach which demonstrates that the clustering-summarization approach statistically significantly outperforms the plain summarization approach in the multi-topic web site summarization task.

The second paper “A strategy for extracting information from semi-structured web pages” by Mahmoud Shaker, Hamidah Ibrahim, Aida Mustapha and Lili Nurliyana Abdullah from Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia presents a strategy for extracting information from web tables of semi-structured web pages by handling the issue of synonym which emerges as these web pages have been designed and created without referring to any standards or guidelines. The paper finds that this strategy extracts information with high precision, and extracts the attributes besides the sub-attributes that describe the extracted attributes and values of the sub-attributes.

The third paper “Efficient XML data and query integration in the wireless sensor network engineering process” by Nils Hoeller, Christoph Reinke, Jana Neumann, Sven Groppe, Christian Werner and Volker Linnemann from the University of Luebeck, Germany presents two separate strategies for integrating XML data management in wireless sensor networks that have been implemented and running on today’s sensor node platforms. The paper further shows how XML data can be processed and how XPath queries can be evaluated dynamically, compares the performance of both strategies concerning the memory and energy efficiency and shows that both solutions have application domains and are fully applicable on today’s sensor node products.

The final paper “Towards flexible and lightweight integration of web applications by end-user programming” by Hao Han (National Institute of Informatics, Japan), and Takehiro Tokuda (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) presents a method called information extraction and functionality emulation to realize the flexible and lightweight integration of web applications in which all searching, submitting and extraction are run at client-side by end-user programming like a real web service.

Ismail KhalilCo-Editor-in-Chief