WISE


Workshop Rationale and Aims

Current Web applications are evolutionary in their nature: in several scenarios, such class of systems require (frequent) changes of content, functionality, semantics, structure, navigation, presentation or implementation. Examples of such applications are found in domains as eHealth, eGovernment, eLearning, and Business to Business interactions such as open marketplaces. In all these domains, the Web enables to do business or professional activities on the Internet. However, application services change over time due to new knowledge, practices, processes, and management approaches in the application domains. Moreover, recent advances in communication and network technologies provide users the ability to access content with different types of (mobile) devices, at any time, from anywhere, and with any media service. Such new needs demand for the development of adaptive Web systems, able to support more effective and efficient interactions in all those situations where the contents and serices offered by the Web application are (rapidly) changing, and/or strongly depend on the current environmental situation, users' (dis)abilities, and/or the actual purpose of the application. Due to the changes in the application domains, the structure, navigation and presentation of Web applications, the content and its semantics are typically highly volatile, and evolve due to a variety of reasons, such as:

  • changes to the design of the application (e.g. to correct design flaws, or to support new requirements)
  • adaptation to new technologies changes to maintain consistency with (changing) external sources (e.g. a referenced ontology, externally linked pages)
  • update/change (by the user) of for example content, structure, navigation, presentation (e.g. relevant with the rise of blogs, wiki's, etc.)
  • maintenance

Properly dealing with evolution will clearly influence the quality of a Web site (i.e. incorrect linking due to changes, unreachable pages and their automatic repair, consistency, etc). Similarly, provisions to automatically deal with evolution and its consequences will become indispensable in large-scale Web applications (where manual management of changes and their impact is infeasible). Also, when ontologies are used to describe or annotate content on Web sites, evolution of these ontologies may have an impact on the validity of the Web sites that refer to these ontologies, and changes in a Web page might invalidate semantic annotations.

Although highly relevant due to the intrinsic evolutionary nature of Web applications, the problem of dealing with adaptation and evolution of Web applications (both during design, implementation and deployment) and its impact is highly under-estimated; so far few works dealt with it in Web Engineering research. AEWSE therefore aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners with different research interests and belonging to communities like Web Engineering, Adaptive Hypermedia, User Modeling, Active Databases, Semantic Web, Ontology Evolution, Database Evolution, Temporal Data, Software Engineering and Mobile Computing. The ultimate goal is to facilitate the discussion of key issues, approaches, open problems, innovative applications, and trends in these research areas, for identifying methodologies and technologies to support adaptive access to and/or evolution in (the design of) Web applications.

Topics of Interests

Areas of particular interest for the Workshop include (but are not limited to):

  • Adaptive or adaptable Web systems (e.g. context-aware, reactive, personalized systems)
  • Ubiquitous and mobile systems
  • Multi-device/Multi-modal adaptive Web systems
  • Testing and evaluation of adaptive Web systems
  • Web system evolution
  • Requirements analysis for adaptive Web systems
  • Model-based methods for adaptive Web systems design
  • Aspect-oriented methods for adaptive Web systems design
  • Adaptability and adaptation in Service Oriented Architectures
  • Semantic Web technologies for adaptivity
  • Ontology evolution w.r.t. Web Engineering
  • Consistency and evolution
  • Technologies enabling adaptivity
  • Temporal Web content
  • Content Management Systems & Web application design
  • Web site design methods & evolution
  • Ontology based Web application design & ontology evolution
  • Changes/evolution & trust/security (e.g. wikipedia)
  • Website version management (WIKI, …)
  • Web 2.0 w.r.t. change/evolution
  • Case studies and industrial experiences, related to these themes

Target Audiences

AEWSE aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from Web engineering, user modeling, adaptive hypermedia, ontology evolution, (active) databases, database evolution, software architectures, mobile computing and ubiquitous information systems, whose work may contribute to the study of evolution in Web applications and the engineering of adaptive Web systems. To enable lively and productive discussions, the desired number of participants is minimum 15, maximum 35.

©2004 • WISE - Web & Information Systems Engineering Lab"
Pleinlaan 2 •(Building G Room 6G305B), 1050 Elsene
Tel.: 02/629.33.08• " contact@wise.vub.ac.be