Theme of the Workshop

Web Information Systems (WIS) use the Web paradigm (and technologies) to retrieve information from data sources and deliver it to the users. Due to their complex requirements the design of WIS is not a trivial task. Design methodologies provide guidelines for the creation of WIS so that the complexity of this process becomes manageable. Based on the separation-of-concerns principle some of these methodologies propose models to specify different aspects of WIS design like data integration, navigation structure, user interface, user interaction, presentation personalization, etc.
Recent advances in networking technologies enabled WIS access via different devices (e.g., PDA, Smart phone, PC, BlackBerry, etc.). In addition to this device heterogeneity there is also a heterogeneous audience (e.g., different backgrounds, different goals, etc.) that wants to access the same system. In order to improve the user experience, these systems often need to personalize the content and its presentation based on the current user needs (e.g., user’s browsing platform or user preferences).
Another aspect that can influence the behaviour of a WIS is the context of use (e.g., the geographical position, the temporal information, the weather conditions, etc.). Systems that are able to exploit this kind of information will further improve the application usefulness for their users. Integrating such information is possibly made available by specialized services and the need to seamlessly integrate these services into a WIS is therefore an important part of WIS development research.
As the Web data is very diverse, WIS are seeking efficient and flexible approaches to provide integrated views over heterogeneous data sources. These data sources are usually autonomous (maintained by different organizations), overlapping, frequently changing, and distributed. All these characteristics make the data integration on the Web a very challenging research topic.
The increased use of rich-clients applications (e.g., AJAX, OpenLaszlo, etc.) poses new demands to WIS design. The design of these applications needs to go beyond the server roundtrip paradigm by considering the new functionality added to clients, an intelligent data-push communication with the server, interactive-rich graphical interfaces, etc. Also, with the current emergence of social Web applications (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) there is a need to properly model the highly dynamic aspects of these systems. In addition, WIS can tap into the data made available by these systems to provide for previously unforeseen functionalities. Making use of rich clients and allowing users to establish social networks are some of the features that need to be considered when developing Web 2.0 applications.
Semantic Web (also known as Web 3.0) technologies (e.g., RDF(S), OWL, etc.) can help in the representation and processing of the different WIS design models aiming for an improved interoperability. One example of such a model is the user profile which is often described using a CC/PP vocabulary. Due to their focus on distribution over the Web, Semantic Web representation languages prove to be useful also for specifying the semantics of data and the semantics of interfaces in order to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous databases and Web services, respectively. The best practice recommendation of Linked Data allows Web applications to seamlessly publish, interconnect, and access information on the Semantic Web. The inference mechanisms of the Semantic Web (captured in the semantics of the representation language or in rule-based languages like RuleML and SWRL) can be used for deriving new information or building intelligent services on the Web.
Over the last few years, Web services have offered new opportunities to deploy WIS. Web services are independent from specific platforms and computing paradigms, and have the capacity to form composed processes, referred to as composite Web services. Web services composition fulfils user requests that require the participation of several component Web services. Several composition languages are now available (e.g., BPEL, WSFL, etc.). Semantic descriptions of Web services are also proposed for automating composition (e.g., OWL-S, WSMO, WSDL-S, etc.). A research topic that is worth pursuing is the modeling of these composite Web services.

Goal of the Workshop

The aim of the workshop is to provide a platform for bringing together researchers, practitioners, designers, and users of WIS and discuss how specific issues of Web Information Systems (WIS) design can be addressed by means of modeling. Specifically, we will discuss how the influence of Semantic Web technology can help in a model-driven WIS development. Thus, the workshop should enable a fruitful exchange of ideas in the state-of-the-art of WIS modeling.

Topics of Interest

The workshop topics include but are not limited to:

Methodologies for WIS Design
WIS Architectures
WIS Adaptability
WIS Personalization
WIS Evolution
Semistructured Data in WIS
Data Models in WIS
Query Languages in WIS
Integration of WIS
Optimization Techniques for WIS
Security in WIS
Business Rules in WIS
Web Services in WIS
WIS Ubiquity
Social WIS
Rich Client WIS
Web Metadata in WIS
Ontologies in WIS
Linked Data in WIS
Semantic Web Information Systems

Paper Submission

Prospective workshop participants are invited to submit a paper related to one (or more) of the workshop topics. The page limit for workshop papers is 10 pages. Papers should be formatted according to Springer LNCS style http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
The organizers will oversee a peer-review process for the submitted papers. Manuscripts not submitted in the LNCS style or having more than 10 pages will not be reviewed and thus automatically rejected. The papers need to be original and not submitted or accepted for publication in any other workshop, conference, or journal. Papers should be submitted to wism2012@ese.eur.nl in PDF format.

Publication

Workshop proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS series as the official ER workshop proceedings.

Organizing Committee & Workshop Co-chairs

Flavius Frasincar (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands)
Geert-Jan Houben (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands)
Philippe Thiran (Namur University, Belgium)

Program Committee

Syed Sibte Raza Abidi (Dalhousie University, Canada)
Djamal Benslimane (University of Lyon 1, France)
Marco Brambilla (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Sven Casteleyn (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain)
Richard Chbeir (Bourgogne University, France)
Jose Palazzo Moreira de Oliveira (UFRGS, Brazil)
Olga De Troyer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Roberto De Virgilio (Universita di Roma Tre, Italy)
Oscar Diaz (University of Basque Country, Spain)
Flavius Frasincar (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands)
Irene Garrigos (Universidad de Alicante, Spain)
Hyoil Han (LeMoyne-Owen College, USA)
Geert-Jan Houben (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands)
Zakaria Maamar (Zayed University, UAE)
Michael Mrissa (University of Lyon, France)
Moira Norrie (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
Oscar Pastor (Valencia University of Technology, Spain)
Dimitris Plexousakis (University of Crete, Greece)
Hajo Reijers (Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands)
Davide Rossi (University of Bologna, Italy)
Klaus-Dieter Schewe (Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria)
Bernhard Thalheim (Christian Albrechts University Kiel, Germany)
Philippe Thiran (Namur University, Belgium)
Riccardo Torlone (Universita di Roma Tre, Italy)
Lorna Uden (Staffordshire University, UK)
Erik Wilde (UC Berkeley, USA)

Local Organizer

Peter Barna (TOPIC, the Netherlands)

Contact Address

wism2012@ese.eur.nl