Fifth International Workshop on
Web Information Systems Modeling (WISM 2008)

Important Dates

Theme of the Workshop

Modern Web Information Systems need to fulfil a large number of requirements. As a consequence the design of these systems is not a trivial process. In order to facilitate WIS modeling, WIS design methodologies propose models in order to describe the specific aspects of these systems.
Recent advances in networking technologies made possible the WIS access using different devices (e.g., PDA, Smart Phone, PC, Black Berry, etc.). In addition to the 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 its users. Such information is possibly made available by Web services that need to be seamlessly integrated in WIS.
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 making the data integration on the Web a very challenging research topic.
The increased use of rich-clients applications (e.g., AJAX, OpenLaszlo) 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.
Semantic Web technologies (e.g., RDF(S), OWL, etc.) can help in the representation 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. Semantic Web representation languages prove to be useful also for describing the semantics of data and the semantics of interfaces in order to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous databases and Web services, respectively. 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 fulfills user requests that require the participation of several component Web services. Several composition languages are now available (e.g., BPEL, WSFL). A research venue that is worth pursuing is the modelling 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 in model-driven design of WIS can increase the ubiquity of these systems. Specifically, we will discuss how the influence of Semantic Web technology can help to improve the ubiquity of WIS. 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:

• WIS Ubiquity
• Business Rules in WIS
• WIS Architectures
• Rich Client WIS
• Semistructured Data in WIS
• Methodologies for WIS Design
• Semantic Web Information Systems
• Data Models in WIS
• Web Metadata in WIS
• Query Languages in WIS
• Integration of WIS
• Ontologies in WIS
• Optimization Techniques for WIS
• Security in WIS

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. They need to be original and not submitted or accepted for publication in any other workshop, conference, or journal.
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 wism2008@win.tue.nl in PDF format.

Publication

Workshop proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS series as the official ER workshop proceedings. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions for publication in prestigious international journals.

Organizing Committee & Workshop Co-chairs

Flavius Frasincar (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands)
Geert-Jan Houben (Vrije Universiteit Brussel & TU Eindhoven, Belgium & the Netherlands)
Philippe Thiran (Namur University, Belgium)

Program Committee

Djamal Benslimane (University of Lyon 1, France)
Tommaso Di Noia (Technical University of Bari, Italy)
Martin Dzbor (The Open University, UK)
Flavius Frasincar (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands)
Martin Gaedke (Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany)
Jaime Gomez (Universidad de Alicante, Spain)
Hyoil Han (Drexel University, USA)
Geert-Jan Houben (Vrije Universiteit Brussel & TU Eindhoven, Belgium & the Netherlands)
Ivan Jelinek (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic)
Zakaria Maamar (Zayed University, UAE)
Michael Mrissa (Namur University, Belgium)
Moira Norrie (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
Oscar Pastor (Valencia University of Technology, Spain)
Dimitris Plexousakis (University of Crete, Greece)
Bernhard Thalheim (Christian Albrechts University Kiel, Germany)
Philippe Thiran (Namur University, Belgium)
Christopher Thomas (Wright State University, USA)
Riccardo Torlone (Universita di Roma Tre, Italy)
Lorna Uden (Staffordshire University, UK)

Local Organizer

Peter Barna (TOPIC, the Netherlands)

Contact Address

wism2008@win.tue.nl