::: WISE 2002 Home Page :::

Second International Workshop on Web and Wireless Geographical Information Systems ( W2GIS 2002)
International Workshop on Data Semantics in Web Information Systems (DASWIS 2002)
First International Workshop on Mining for Enhanced Web Search (MEWS 2002)

Tutorials

"Web Mining : A Bird's Eyeview", Sanjay Kumar Madria, Department of Computer Science, University of Missouri-Rolla, USA.
"XML: The Base Technology for the Semantic Web", Erich J. Neuhold Fraunhofer IPSI and Tech. Univ. Darmstadt, Germany.
"Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Commerce: Issues and Enabling Technologies", Boualem Benatallah, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
"Web Services for the Technical Practitioner", Jan Newmarch, School of Network Computing, Monash University, Australia.

Details on Tutorials:

1. "Web Mining: A Bird's Eye View" Sanjay Kumar Madria, Department of Computer Science, University of Missouri-Rolla, USA.
- Summary
  Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to WWW to find useful patterns. Web mining can have three operations of interests - clustering (finding groupings of users with similar behavior, grouping of similar pages, etc.), associations (which web pages are being requested together), and sequential analysis (the order in which web pages tend to be accessed). People and applications can take advantage of these patterns to access WWW more efficiently. Web mining can be divided into three categories: content mining, usage mining, and structure mining.
  Web Content Mining: Web content mining is an automatic process that extracts patterns from on-line information, such as the web pages, and it goes beyond only the keyword extraction or some simple statistics of words and phrases in documents.
  Web Structure Mining: Web structure mining focused on using the analysis of the link structure of the web, and one of its purposes is to identify documents, which are pointed to or pointed by many relevant web pages. The idea is to generate web communities among pages linked with each other.
  Web Usage Mining: Web servers record and accumulate log file about user interactions whenever requests for resources (web pages) are received. Analyzing the web access logs of different web sites can help understand the user behavior and the web structure, thereby improving the design of the web sites.
  In this tutorial, we review some of the work done by researchers in these areas.
- Biography
  Sanjay Kumar Madria received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 1995. He is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Missouri-Rolla, USA. Earlier he was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA. He has published more than 75 Journal and conference papers in the areas of web warehousing, mobile databases, nested transaction management and performance issues. He has chaired international conferences and workshops, organized tutorials, and has actively served in the program committees of numerous international database and web mining conferences and has been reviewer for many database journals. He participated as panelist in National Science Foundation and Swedish Research Council. He is an IEEE senior member and ACM member.
2. "XML: The Base Technology for the Semantic Web", Erich J. Neuhold Fraunhofer Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI) and Tech. Univ., Darmstadt, Germany.
- The main contribution of the Semantic Web also constitutes its main challenge: How can activities of WEB participants be coupled flexibly yet reliably to find and carry out their WEB related tasks more effectively?
  By providing a general and widely adopted framework for defining and deploying application domain specific vocabularies, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) promises to be an important base technology. By agreeing on a common vocabulary, information is given well defined meaning enabling computers and humans to cooperate across organizational borders. The XML related standards DTD's, XML Schema and the upcoming XML Query standard provide a sound technological basis employed by e.g. the XML e-business frameworks like RosettaNet or ebXML. In principle this will always be sufficient if the players in a domain can agree on specific DTD's or XML schematas for the predominant documents in their applications.
  On the next higher level, technologies for the coupling of different vocabularies are required to establish a common context across different application domains. The underlying idea is to define and link data on the Web such that it can be easily discovered, automated, and integrated across different application domains. In particular, semantic modeling languages like the resource description framework (RDF) and topic maps employ XML syntax to achieve this objective. As a consequence, e.g. e-business concepts could be described via RDF's and the mapping between differing vocabularies and DTD's or XML schematas could be achieved via these semantics. Again this approach is useful when larger, quite stable communities are planning and willing to work together.
  The full potential of the semantic web is reached, when new tools exploit those cross domain vocabularies to automatically extract and relate the meta information in a new context. Web Ontology languages like DAML+OIL extend RDF with richer modeling primitives and provide a technological basis to enable the semantic web. These tools will become essential to handle the full dynamics in the WEB where new information constructs, like WEB pages, data stores, wrappers, directories, and meta-data repositories appear all the time, use undeclared vocabularies and structures but still require automatic processing to satisfy the information supply and information handling demands of an ever changing WEB user community.
  Beside the modeling aspects, the Semantic Web also requires new tools enabling flexible and preferment XML processing addressing dynamic peer-to-peer environments, portals, and distributed market-places. This includes flexible validation mechanisms, efficient storage and retrieval of data, their associated metadata and their processing mechanisms as well as dynamic linkage and discovery of information on the basis of existing and coming standards in such a way turning the Web into a worldwide service provider for all of us.
  This tutorial introduces:
  - arguments and reasons for the XML approach and the Semantic Web
  - the principal ideas behind the Semantic Web
  - definition od XML, DTD's, XML Schema and XML Query
  - definition of common vocabularies on the basis XML technologies
  - RDF as XML technology to enable interoperable vocabularies
  - DAML+OIL as XML-based Web ontology languages
  - new challenges for XML tools, architectures, and service environments to create the Semantic Web
  - conclusions and research subjects
- Biography
  Erich J. Neuhold received his M. S. in Electronics and his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, in 1963 and 1967, respectively.
  From 1963 to 1972 he was a research scientist at the IBM Corporation in Vienna and the USA. There he was working on program languages, translators, formal description techniques and operating systems. From 1972 to 1983 he was Professor of Computer Science, Chair of Application Software, at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His research field included distributed database and information systems, formal description systems for presentation of complex software products as well as software engineering.
  In the years 1983 and 1984 he was Director of the Information Management Laboratory and later of the Systems Software Laboratory at Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto, USA. There he also worked in the areas of distributed operation systems and communication systems.
  From 1984 to 1986 he was Professor of Computer Science, Technical University of Vienna, Institute for Applied Informatics and Systems Analysis. His work included distributed databases, knowledge-based systems and object-oriented approaches in these fields.
  Since 1986 he is Director of the Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI) in Darmstadt, Germany (a former Institute of the German National Research Center for Information Technology - GMD, since July 2001 a Fraunhofer Institute). He is a member of many professional societies, an IEEE senior member, and currently holds the chairs of the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries and the Technical Committee on Data Engineering.
  Since 1989 he is also Professor of Computer Science, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.
  His primary research and development interests are in heterogeneous multimedia database systems, WEB technologies and persistent information and knowledge repositories (XML, RDF) and content engineering. In content engineering special emphasis is given to all technological aspects of the publishing value chain that arise for digital products in the WEB environment. Search, access and delivery includes semantic based retrieval of multimedia documents.
  He also guides research and development in user interfaces including virtual reality concepts for information visualization, computer supported cooperative work, ambient intelligence, mobile and wireless technology, security in the WEB and applications like e-learning, e-commerce, e-culture and e-government.
  National and international cooperation with research and industrial partners ensures the transfer of results into widely available prototypes and products.
  Publications: 190 papers, 4 books, 9 edited books.
3. Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Commerce: Issues and Enabling Technologies
- Boualem Benatallah
  School of Computer Science and Engineering
  University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
  Phone: +61 2 9385 4767, Fax: +61 2 9385 5995
  boualem@cse.unsw.edu.au
- Summary
  The purpose of this tutorial is to present a comprehensive overview of issues and enabling technologies related to the development and deployment of B2B E-Commerce (EC) solutions. We focus on the data and service integration aspects. Introperability is a critical issue in B2B EC. Information formats are becoming more diverse and the number of information sources, applications, and systems is increasing dramatically. Today's EC systems are a complex assembly of diverse components including Web servers, databases, legacy applications, and middleware services. More significantly, the fast and dynamic integration of business processes has become an essential requirement for organizations to adapt their practices to the Web.
  The tutorial will be modular in nature. We first introduce the main functions and components of a B2B EC framework. We then present the interoperability layers (e.g., communication, content, and business process) in B2B EC systems. The fundamental dimensions (e.g., coupling among partners, heterogeneity, scalability, and security) used to assess B2B EC integration solutions will be discussed. We then review relevant B2B integration approaches including component-based middleware (e.g., CORBA/Java based solutions, Enterprise Application Integration suites), inter-enterprise work ows, and Web service technologies (e.g., UDDI, WSDL, XLANG, WSFL, ebXML). We also look at the role of B2B integration standards (e.g., RosettaNet, eCO, cXML, EDI) in providing support for handling document and business process semantic heterogeneity. We also overview a few sample research projects and commercial systems (e.g., BEA WebLogic Collaborate, IBM Websphere, Microsoft .NET, and WebMethods B2B integration solutions). We conclude the tutorial with a discussion of open research issues in building B2B integration solutions.
  The targeted audience of this tutorial includes practitioners interested in B2B integration solutions, and researchers interested in B2B EC, Web data and service integration research.
- Biography
  Dr. Boualem Benatallah is a senior lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (Sydney). His latest work focused on Web services and Web databases. He has several funded projects in these areas. He is co-author of Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems (Kluwer, 1998). He is also co-author of E-Commerce Enabling Technologies, Pearson Education, 2002. He is a co-guest editor for the Special Issue on Web services, Parallel and Distributed Databases, an International Journal, Kluwer Academics Publisher, 2002. He has published widely in highly reputable international journals and conferences.
4. "Web Services for the Technical Practitioner", Jan Newmarch, School of Network Computing, Monash University, Australia.
- Summary
  Web services are promoted as the next evolution of the Web, moving from person-oriented consumption of Web information towards machine to machine production and consumption of information. This will move one step closer to the "semantic Web", a goal of many in the Web community. In reality, many aspects of Web services are a poor implementation of twenty year old technology.
  This tutorial examines Web services from a hands-on view of someone who has to build and deploy these services, and looks at the programming tools, languages and environments to do this. It will examine both the good and the weak aspects of Web technology, in order to understand the potentials and the limitations of Web services from a technical viewpoint.
  The content will cover:
  - Overview and components of Web services
  - SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): concepts, scope and limitations
  - Programming language and library support for SOAP
  - Transport mechanisms: HTTP, email, etc
  - WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
  - UDDI
- Biography
  Jan Newmarch is a Professor in the School of Network Computing, Monash University, Australia. He has published extensively in the fields of AI and logic programming, user interfaces and Motif programming, Web technologies, and distributed middleware systems. He has written books on Logic Programming, X Window/Motif Programming and on Jini. He is a regular presenter of tutorials at technically oriented conferences, and has given tutorials at conferences in the US, Australia and Asia.