Editorial

Citation

Khalil, I., Taniar, D. and Pardede, E. (2013), "Editorial", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 9 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijwis.2013.36209aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Web Information Systems, Volume 9, Issue 1

This issue of the International Journal of Web Information Systems (IJWIS) contains one survey paper and four regular research papers.

The survey paper reviews different information visualization techniques for securing web information systems with the purpose to provide a foundation for further studies of the topic and to discover future directions in which there is a lack of extensive research, thereby encouraging more investigations.

The first research paper (“An adaptive framework for QoS-aware service selection”) studies the applicability of blackboard and genetic algorithms to solve QoS-aware service selection problems and compare them in terms of runtime, scalability and quality of the solutions. Authors showed that the blackboard approach outperforms the genetic algorithm for small problem spaces, while the situation is reversed for bigger problem spaces, although generally the blackboard reaches solutions of slightly better overall quality. Authors show how dynamic aspects of a system can be captured, described and analyzed. Based on this and on more detailed findings regarding performance and scalability of the blackboard and genetic algorithm, they propose a hybrid approach that takes advantage of the strength of both approaches. The vision is to provide a global and adaptive approach to QoS-aware service selection problems, not tailored to only a specific application domain, but capable of capturing system behavior and reacting to it.

The second paper (“Using the structure of B⁺-Trees for enhancing logging mechanisms of databases”) defines a novel signature of a B⁺-Tree, a widely used storage structure in database management systems and propose its utilization for supporting the logging in databases. While database management systems implement sophisticated access control mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access and modifications, malicious database administrators may still be able to bypass the security mechanisms in order to make hidden modifications to the database. This additional logging mechanism is especially useful in conjunction with forensic techniques that directly target the underlying tree structure of an index. Several techniques for applying this signature in the context of digital forensics on B⁺- Trees are proposed in this paper.

The third paper (“NoSQL databases: a step to database scalability in web environment”) focuses on the so-called NoSQL databases. In the context of cloud computing, architectures and basic features of these databases are studied, particularly their horizontal scalability and concurrency model, that is mostly weaker than ACID transactions in relational SQL-like database systems. Some characteristics like a data model and querying capabilities are discussed. It is shown that due to horizontal scaling it is not possible to reach simply ACID properties. However, it does not mean, that any cloud computing agrees to give up the preservation of these properties.

The last paper in this issue (“Tip information from social media based on topic detection”) shows how social media of many kinds that exist on the internet have created numerous and diverse communities. Using social media, users who are members of social media community post and exchange information that is related to personal behaviour, experimentation, and their own sentiments. Sometimes this information is not included in the contents of ordinary web pages. As described in this paper, authors propose a method for extracting tip information based on the author’s experience. Important tip information uses some tip keywords from SNSs as a first step in extracting tip information from social media.

We would like to thank the authors who contributed their papers to this issue, external reviewers who tirelessly reviewed and provided constructive comments to the authors.

February 2013

Ismail Khalil, David Taniar, Eric Pardede