Editorial

Citation

Khalil Ibrahim, I. (2008), "Editorial", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 4 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijwis.2008.36204baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Web Information Systems, Volume 4, Issue 2

This issue of the International Journal of Web Information Systems consists of five distinguished papers which have been stringently selected among 113 papers submitted to the 9th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications and Services (iiWAS2007) which took place from December 3-5, 2007 in Jakarta, Indonesia. iiWAS series of conferences have proved during the last nine years to be a leading international conferences for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results, and practical development experiences from all data integration and web applications and services fields. Visionary concepts and stimulating ideas in web information systems at both the theory and application levels have been presented in iiWAS2007 which aims to present and disseminate knowledge on an international basis in the area of web information systems.

These five papers selected for this issue address diverse interesting issues ranging from software development life cycle to updating XML documents, to the use of ontologies for XML data translation and query expansion.

The first paper entitled “Updating multidimensional XML documents” by Nikolaos Fousteris, Manolis Gergatsoulis, and Yannis Stavrakas presents a novel approach for updating multidimensional XML documents by proposing update operations on both, the graph level and the (relational) storage level. The paper introduces six basic update operations, which are capable of any possible change. It specifies those operations in an implementation independent way, and explains their effect in the document through examples. Algorithms that implement those operations using SQL on a specific storage method that employs relational tables for keeping MXML are proposed and an overview of MXPath, an extension of XPath that incorporates context, is given to show how to translate MXPath queries to “equivalent” SQL queries.

The second paper “COTS-based software product line development” by Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed, Shereef Al-Maati, and Zaher Al Aghbari describes a systematic approach for COTS (components off-the-shelf) based development that takes into account the cataloguing and retrieval of software assets permeating a process that encompasses all stages of software development from system product requirements engineering to system deployment. The model has the potential to tremendously increase software engineers’ productivity. Thus, software architects, domain engineers, and component designers should become aware of how to use these ideas to structure their models and designs.

The third paper “Ontology mediated XML data translation” by Kai Yang, Amanda Lo, and Robert Steele addresses problems that exist in the context of XML to ontology translation. The paper firstly discusses the problem regarding the loss of information during roundtrip transformation between XML and ontology, followed by the proposal of a mapping representation ontology for modeling concept mappings defined between XML schema and ontology. A two-step compensation approach is proposed in this paper that aims to prevent the loss of data type, structural and relational information during any single-trip data translation. The ontology proposed aims to capture a sufficient amount of information to ensure that any loss of information during translation will be compensated, such that a bidirectional data conversion between XML and ontology can be undertaken successfully. The outcomes from this work will also allow for seamless data translations between XML documents through ontology mediation.

The fourth paper “ Adaptive ontology re-use: finding and re-using sub-ontologies” by Rodolfo Stecher, Claudia Niederée, Wolfgang Nejdl and Paolo Bouquet presents adaptive re-use of ontologies by finding and partially re-using parts of existing ontological resources for building new ontologies which is a new idea in the field, and the inclusion of the modeling perspective in the computation of the matches adds a new perspective that could also be exploited by other matching approaches. Owing to the combination of techniques presented in this general approach, the work described performs in the general case as well as approaches tailored for a specific usage scenario.

The last paper in this issue “A hybrid solution of ontology-based query expansion” by Thanh C. Nguyen and Tuoi T. Phan proposes an approach to develop the ontology of key property and key member of an object, and then introduces the algorithms of query expansion to support not only internet search-engines but also built-in information retrieval systems. The finding also has good experimental results when applying on English documents and queries. It also shows the proposed approach is possible and it can be developed and upgraded in future.

Taking this opportunity, we would like to thank all the authors, referees, and the journal Editorial Board for their contributions and valuable comments on this issue.

Ismail Khalil Ibrahim