Preface

Citation

Khalil, I. (2011), "Preface", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 7 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijwis.2011.36207aaa.002

Preface

Article Type: Preface From: International Journal of Web Information Systems, Volume 7, Issue 1

This is the first issue of Volume 7 of the International Journal of Web Information Systems, which commences the seventh year of this journal which has served a large community of researchers and academic around the world with the highest quality articles while reporting the state-of-the-art research results and scientific findings allowing students, developers, engineers, innovators, research strategists and IT - managers in this field to gain greater insight into web information systems as they relate to applications, management and opportunities within any given construct.

In this issue, we have four outstanding papers. The first paper in this issue “Botnets: threats and responses” by Ok-Ran Jeong, Chulyun Kim, Won Kim and Jungmin So from Kyungwon University, Korea, provides a comprehensive review of the current status of botnets and a summary of up-to-date responses to botnets from both technical and legal aspects, which can be used as a stepping stone for further research.

The topic of botnets has gained a lot of interest in recent years because botnets have become the platform for many online threats such as spam, denial of service attacks, phishing, data thefts and online frauds.

The second paper “Automatic linguistic knowledge acquisition for the web” by Werner Winiwarter from University of Vienna, Austria, which has been awarded the Emerald Web Information Systems best paper award which has been presented at the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications and Services (iiWAS2010) in Paris, France, last November addresses the knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem in natural language processing by introducing a new rule-based approach for the automatic acquisition of linguistic knowledge. In addition to its high practical impact on academic language education, automatic linguistic knowledge acquisition also could have implications for the translation industry by superseding certain translation tasks and, on the other hand, adding value and quality to others.

The third paper “Semantic relatedness measurement based on Wikipedia link co-occurrence analysis” by Masahiro Ito, Kotaro Nakayama, Takahiro Hara and Shojiro Nishio from Osaka University and University of Tokyo, Japan, proposes an efficient semantic relatedness measurement method that leverages global statistical information of Wikipedia by constructing a new test collection based on Wikipedia concepts for evaluating semantic relatedness measurement methods. The paper tries to overcome the problems of accuracy and scalability which are facing previous methods in this field.

The final paper in this issue “A query language for selecting, harmonizing and aggregating heterogeneous XML data” by Turkka Näppilä, Katja Moilanen and Timo Niemi from the University of Tampere, Finland, introduces a declarative query language, called RXQL, capable of dealing with heterogeneous XML documents in data-centric applications. In RXQL, data harmonization (i.e. the removal of heterogeneous factors from XML data) is integrated with typical data-centric features (e.g. grouping, ordering and aggregation) in the manipulation of heterogeneous XML data.

Ismail KhalilCo-Editor-in-Chief