Special Section on Web Technologies

Abstract

The increasing popularity and advances in Web technologies (XML, Web services, semantic Web, etc.) are enabling the development of new classes of applications and new trends in the design of information systems. This special section focuses on emerging Web technologies, architectures, and methodologies for building and managing advanced Web information systems. Internet-related technologies have created an interconnected world in which information can be exchanged easily, tasks can be processed col-laboratively, communities of users with similar interests can be formed to achieve efficiency and improve performance, while security threats are present more than ever before. This special section on Web Technologies continues the efforts that were put into the Web Technologies Track that was held as part of the 23 rd Three articles out of the articles that were accepted for presentation at the track were selected for inclusion in this special section after another round of review by experts in the field of Web technologies. The selection reflected the high standards for excellence used by the many esteemed members of the editorial board who contributed to this special section. Their contributions are greatly appreciated. The articles are organized as follows. In an executable language/enactment engine approach for Designing and architecting process-aware Web applications'', Rossi and Turrini mention that today's Web applications allow the participation of several actors in complex enterprise wide (or even multi-enterprise) business processes and pose new challenges to software designers and architects. The design models have to address both navigational and process-based interactions; the software architecture has to provide the components to enact the process and has to define how these components interoperate with the other components of the Web applications. Rossi and Turrini show how, promoting an effective separation of concerns, a process modeling language and its enactment engine can be used in the modeling and implementation of process-aware Web applications. In " AGATHE: An Agent-and Ontology-Based System for Gathering Information about Restricted Web Domains " , Espinasse, Fournier, and Freitas highlight the task complexity of relevant information gathering on the Web. Taking into account pages' contexts and considering restricted domains, the authors propose an agent-and ontology-based restricted-domain cooperative information gathering approach. The approach takes advantage of some techniques of classification and extraction based on ontologies. A generic agent-oriented architecture called AG-ATHE is presented. A prototype of AGATHE was