Editorial message: special track on web and E-business applications

The World WideWeb has become the standard computing platform for the development of new-generation information systems. A new tide of Web-based e-business applications (such as corporate portals, network-based supply chains and market places, etc.) is driving the need for a more open, flexible and distributed infrastructure, together with appropriate development methodologies and theoretical settings. Today's web applications involve skills from many different areas of computer science, including databases, AI and agent based applications, programming languages and algorithms, distributed computing, information retrieval, semantic modeling, etc. For this reason we proposed a track on Web and E-business applications based on the following main topics: data models for the World Wide Web, Web data management, languages for the World Wide Web and XML, E- business and Web services, transactions on the World Wide Web, security and integrity issues for the WWW, query systems for the World Wide Web, management and storage of Web information, information retrieval and search engines for the Web, Web semantics, data integration over the World Wide Web, data-intensive applications on the World Wide Web, Web architectures.We received 30 submissions, which were extensively reviewed for originality, significance, technical soundness and clarity of presentation. The submitted papers covered most of the proposed topics. The number of submissions distributed on each continent has been the following: 16 from Europe (53%), 9 from North America (30%), 3 from Asia (10%), 1 from Africa (3%) and 1 from Australia (3%). 12 papers corresponding to the 40% of the submitted papers have been selected for presentation at the conference, with the following distribution: 7 from Europe, 3 from America, 1 from Asia and 1 from Australia.