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Bibliometric analysis of published scientific papers is a widely used practice to conduct quantitative evaluations and assessments of conferences. In this study, we performed an in-depth bibliometric, scientometric and exploratory analysis of ACM SIGWEB sponsored conferences by visually analysing the DBLP database. We conducted a series of experiments and empirical analysis to answer several questions. Our results showed that the articles published in SIGWEB conferences stem from a variety of countries while the degree of cross-country collaboration is relatively low and that most co-authors of publications are by researchers who all reside in the same country. Collectively, SIGWEB conferences have a higher hosting rate and local community participation in places where the USA and Europe make the greatest conference contributions. Our results showed that the participation of female authors in SIGWEB conferences is increasing while in contrast, there is a huge gender imbalance in leadership and official conference positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applications such as Twitter, Facebook or Youtube have taken the internet community by storm and have literally initiated a revolution in online communication. These social media applications are also often referred to by the general, somewhat vague but yet eloquent term - Web 2.0. The term implies a perceived second generation of World Wide Web, i.e., Web 1.0 → Web 2.0. Nevertheless the reference to a 'second' version of the web is misleading, since there was not any specific technical update of the World Wide Web. Hence, this paper empirically explores social media in a historical context as it has evolved and driven a revolution in online communication over the last decade. A unique historical dataset, made available by the Wayback Machine Internet Archive project is employed in order to provide an accurate historical record of the primary web design and related elements that drove the evolution towards a more social and interactive web. This study presents a unique contribution to related academic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As consumers nowadays generate increasingly more content describing their experiences with, e.g., products and brands in various languages, information systems monitoring a universal, language-independent measure of people's intended sentiment are crucial for today's businesses. In order to facilitate sentiment analysis of user-generated content, we propose to map sentiment conveyed by unstructured natural language text to universal star ratings, capturing intended sentiment. For these mappings, we consider a monotonically increasing step function, a naïve Bayes method, and a support vector machine. We demonstrate that the way in which natural language reveals intended sentiment differs across our datasets of Dutch and English texts. Additionally, the results of our experiments on modelling the relation between conveyed sentiment and intended sentiment suggest that language-specific sentiment scores can separate universal classes of intended sentiment from one another to a limited extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location-based mobile applications require timely generation of user-centric proximities from application-relevant repositories of business locations. The proximity generation requirement is poorly served by conventional query resolution methods which are prone to response time degradation as repositories experience growth. This article reports research on a location-aware method (LAM) specifically devised to resolve queries for rapid proximity generation. Three operational concerns performance, scalability, and manageability provide a basis on which a specific form of LAM, linkcell-based LAM, is examined. Previous evaluative work on linkcell-based LAM focused on multiple category repositories (MCRs) in which business locations are explicitly classified using a predefined set of business categories. The research reported here concerns single category repositories (SCRs), an important special case in which no predefined set of business categories is used. Results show how a reformulated location-aware method may be used to manage SCRs and suggest the means by which scalability is achieved and proximity generation performance is optimised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web has become closely ingrained with our life and massive effort for web development and maintenance continues to take place in an ad hoc manner, resulting in poor quality web systems and applications. Problems such as outdated or irrelevant information, difficulties in using the website, website crashes, and security breaches are common. We encounter these kinds of problems because web developers failed to address users' needs along with the improper appliance of the web engineering process in all its phases. As a consequence, web engineering and more precisely web requirements engineering is becoming of major importance in the web development process. In this context, this work tackles the validation of the navigational requirements of a web application. A methodology named NRVA is introduced in order to validate the navigational requirements for correctness, consistency, and completeness. It is based on the generation of an XML document defining the navigational rules of the application and used as input to the animator. The supporting tool to the approach does not only validate the correctness of the generated requirements, but also it aids to the elaboration and enhancement of those requirements through visualisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender systems are software frameworks that employ a specific type of information filtering technique, aiming at recommending information items or social elements that are likely to be of interest to the user. Herein, we present the evaluation results of the recently prototyped tourism recommender system (TRS). We followed a formal evaluation process to validate the usability of two versions of the TRS by users in realistic environments; the first is a typical web recommender system (wTRS), while the second is a system that enables tourist content recommendations addressed to mobile users (mTRS). The usability evaluation tests have been undertaken at the municipality of Mytilene, Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is designed to enable integration of heterogeneous business components, and thus is argued to improve enterprise evolution and agility. In order to identify service-oriented system evolution taxonomy, it is suggested to build on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory that interprets phenomenon of evolution and emergence of new properties. This required a survey of service-oriented system design and development techniques and principles, and their mapping to CAS evolutionary principles. Based on this analysis, the paper identifies four major categories of service-oriented system evolution: a) service structural properties, e.g., flexibility of service, loose coupling, re-usability, etc.; b) enterprise enabling factors, e.g., enterprise architecture, organisation structure and management style; c) evolution dynamics, e.g., interactions within the enterprise and with users, prototyping, iterative and incremental development in SOA realisation, etc.; d) controlling factors, e.g., continuous reflection, learning and adjustment supported by formalised standards in SOA programming, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance techniques. This led to deriving a process model utilising these four categories to enable service-oriented system evolution. Metrics are suggested to benchmark system structural properties and controlling factors, including SOA flexibility, SOA quality attributes and SOA governance to ensure sustainable evolution and avoiding disordered results in response to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed a configurable meta-search engine for the human resource domain which aims to aid job seekers in searching for job vacancies and to support meta-search providers in the rapid development of meta-search engines. A significant challenge in accessing heterogeneous, distributed information via meta-search engines is the schema/data matching and integration that is needed for resolving semantic heterogeneities between different source search engines. We adopt a hybrid approach, using multiple matching criteria and matchers. A domain-specific ontology serves as a global ontology. Mappings are derived between this and the source search engine interfaces. These mappings are used to generate an integrated meta-search query interface, support query processing in the meta-search engine, and resolve semantic conflicts arising during result extraction from the source search engines. Experiments conducted in the job search domain show that our hybrid approach increases the correctness of matching during the integration of source search interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After several years of research, the fundamental semantic web technologies have reached a high maturity level. Nevertheless, the average web user has not yet taken advantage of their full potential. In this paper, we introduce the semantic web bottleneck, analyse the main problems that preserve it and suggest ways to overcome it. In particular, we discuss the issues involved in deploying, maintaining and using semantically rich web applications, decomposing this process into two primal ones: publishing and exploiting semantic content. We analyse the role of key players such as the web industry, the search engines, the academia, the web user, and the web engineers that essentially materialise and use these technologies. A roadmap is provided in order for the semantic web to gain further acceptance, based on three major axes: simplicity, mainly entailed by automation, integration with the existing technologies and practices, and adoption by the web industry driving forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, more and more Web sites and Applications (WebApps) are becoming mission-critical systems. Measures of functional size are a prerequisite to successful quantitative management of software projects. However, the nature of the web has recently imposed new and challenging characteristics, which are not supported by the existing estimation metric and models. In order to avoid the Web crisis, we urge the use of web engineering approaches for developing and estimating web projects in a systematic way. To achieve this goal, we present a novel size metric for accurately measuring the functional size of web applications early in the development life cycle. The main contribution of this work is the introduction of a measurement process that is embedded in the conceptual modelling phase of a model-driven approach for developing web applications. The results obtained from our experiments with this approach are outlined in this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web applications are evolving towards strong content-centred information systems accessible through the web. The development processes and implementation of these applications are unlike the development and implementation of traditional information systems. In this paper, we propose a Web Engineering Method (WEM): a method for developing Content Management System (CMS)-based web applications. Critical to a successful development of CMS-based web applications is adaptation to the dynamic business. We first define CMS-based web applications and identify their specific characteristics. Combining these characteristics with situational factors in projects, we show that by taking parts of proven methods, such as UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) and the Unified Process (UP), a unique method can be assembled for situational development of CMS-based web applications. We successfully validated the method at GX, a web-technology company specialised in developing and implementing CMS-based web applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing size and complexity of many websites have made navigation through these sites increasingly difficult. Attempting to automatically predict the next page for a website user to visit has many potential benefits, for example in site navigation, automatic tour generation, adaptive web applications, recommendation systems, web server optimisation, web search and web pre-fetching. This paper describes an approach to link prediction using a Markov chain model based on an exponentially smoothed transition probability matrix which incorporates site usage statistics collected over multiple time periods. The improved performance of this approach compared to earlier methods is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe a user-oriented reliability model that addresses extensive web content, including many links, and that simultaneously addresses user dynamic navigation behaviour. Computation time is a problem in web systems because content can be tightly coupled. An alternative approach is to skip the consideration of the actual dynamic relationships but this is undesirable because the quality of a web system is bound to the success of a series of user navigations. These issues motivate our study from a user perspective. By parsing the logs, past navigations can be restored to form a flow graph. Our model adopts the idea of cyclomatic complexity to convert the graph to a maximum number of independent paths so that reliability can be computed by discounting the probabilities of unreliable paths. The application of this model can prioritise the fault removal sequence to assist in resource and effort allocation to improve reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex product assortments offered by online stores and electronic marketplaces make the identification of appropriate solutions a challenging task. Customers can differ greatly in their level of product domain knowledge. Therefore, recommender applications that support the product selection process are required. Knowledge-based recommender technologies allow flexible mapping of product, marketing and sales knowledge to the formal representation of a knowledge base and thus support customer-oriented sales dialogues in online selling environments. Although these technologies are frequently applied in industrial settings, related development processes are still very time-consuming. This paper presents the Koba4MS environment that supports graphical knowledge acquisition for web-based recommender applications and thus improves the effectiveness of related development and maintenance processes. The results of an experiment that investigated the effects of applying automated testing and debugging techniques to recommender knowledge base development clearly show the applicability and effectiveness of our approach in terms of time savings and reduced error rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When considering the addition of a mobile presentation channel to an existing web-based application, project managers should know how the mobile channel's characteristics will impact the user experience and the cost of using the application, even before development begins. The PETTICOAT (Performance Tuning and cost discovery of mobile web-based Applications) approach presented here provides decision-makers with indicators on the economical feasibility of mobile channel development. In a nutshell, it involves analysing interaction patterns on the existing stationary channel, identifying key business processes among them, measuring the time and data volume incurred in their execution, and then simulating how the same interaction patterns would run when subjected to the frame conditions of a mobile channel. As a result of the simulation, we then gain time and volume projections for those interaction patterns that allow us to estimate the costs incurred by executing certain business processes on different mobile channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality assurance is one of the most significant issues web engineering has to deal with. It is crucial to define adequate quality models in order to determine the most significant properties for quality evaluation of websites. Usability should be one of those properties as it bears on efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction. Moreover, it has been demonstrated to be a key property for users in recent European Commission's benchmark studies on quality and usage of public e-services. Web accessibility is also a significant property that websites have to fulfil in order to ensure equal access for all people in the Information Society. Therefore, both accessibility and usability should be included in such quality models. This paper presents an empirical study carried out with the aim of analysing the relationship between these two properties. The results show that the provision of technical web accessibility does not intrinsically guarantee web usability. Actually, other non-accessibility metrics such as the number of images, links and words of the web home page were better predictors of the users' effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web applications are the most widely used class of software today. Increased diversity of web-client platform configurations causes execution of web applications to vary unpredictably, creating a myriad of challenges for quality assurance during development. This paper presents a novel technique and an inductive model that leverages empirical data from fielded systems to evaluate web application correctness across multiple client configurations. The inductive model is based on HTML tags and represents how web applications are expected to execute in each client configuration based on the fielded systems observed. End-users and developers update this model by providing empirical data in the form of positive (correctly executing) and negative (incorrectly executing) instances of fielded web applications. The results of an empirical study show that the approach is useful and that popular web applications have serious client-configuration-specific flaws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are a significant number of proposals for modelling and developing web applications, but very few of them rigorously deal with how to elicit and represent requirements, and how to go from the Requirements Model to the Conceptual Model with a sound methodological basis. This work presents an approach to capture web application requirements. The main goal of this approach is to provide analysts with techniques that allow them to specify not only the functional and data requirements of a web application but also the navigational ones at early stages. These techniques make it possible to identify, specify and describe every task that must be achieved by web application users. In addition, we introduce a strategy based on graph transformations that allow us to automate the derivation of the navigational model of the OOWS method from early requirements specifications. Finally, by using the OOWS automatic code capabilities, we show how this graph transformations-based strategy allows us to obtain web applications prototypes from early requirements specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a CASE tool for the high-level specification of web applications integrated with web services. The CASE tool is based on WebML, a conceptual modelling language used for the specification of the front end of web applications. WebML, extended with new primitives for modelling web services, allows one to specify complex interactions between a web application, driven by the user, and remote processes, represented by services. The CASE tool also allows the specification and deployment of application functionalities as web services and automatically generates the running code, including web pages, web services calls and the exposed web services. In this paper, we describe the primitives for web services modelling, the architecture of the CASE tool for designing the applications, and the runtime architecture of the generated applications. Finally, we give an overview of some industrial applications developed with the described approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, innovation in technologies such as XML, web services and component-based development has led to interest in business processes. For this reason several languages for designing and implementing business processes, such as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), have been created. However, one weakness of these languages is that they are difficult for business analysts to use in the early stages of the web information systems development process. In this work, we present a model-driven method for service composition modelling. The method defines a process, new models and the mappings between them. The process first identifies the services that will be offered to the user and then allows obtaining a service composition model, which facilitates the mapping to a specific web services composition language. The proposed method is illustrated through a case study of a web information system for the management of medical images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]