WORKSHOP REPORT

Report on the 7th ACM International Workshop on
Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2005)
Angela Bonifati
Dongwon LeeIcar CNR
College of Information Sciences and Technology
Italian National Research Council
The Pennsylvania State University
I-87036 – Rende – Italy
University Park, PA 16802, USA
bonifati@icar.cnr.it
dongwon@psu.edu

1 Introduction
The 7th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2005)
was held at the Hilton Bremen Hotel in Bremen (Germany), on November 5, 2005, in conjunction
with the 14th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2005). The main objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers, industrial practitioners,and developers to discuss how Web information can be extracted, stored, analyzed, and processed toprovide useful knowledge to the end users for various advanced database and Web applications.
WIDM 2005 was sponsored by ACM SIGIR and by GI (Gesellshaft für Informatik) and was incooperation with ACM SIGMOD.
WIDM 2005 implemented a one-day program as it happened in previous editions since 1998. WIDM
2005 received the submission of 44 papers from 15 countries around the world, 12 of which wereaccepted for presentation at the workshop and included in the proceedings published by ACM Press[1].
For the first time in WIDM tradition, we accepted 8 full (8 pages long) and 4 short (6 pages long)contributions.
The WIDM 2005 program committee was composed of 39 members from 14 different countries(Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Singapore,Switzerland, USA and Venezuela). This program committee, which included some of the mostprominent researchers in the area, participated actively in the paper reviewing process, being thus
responsible for the high quality of the workshop technical program.

2 Topics of Interest
As stated in the call-for-papers, the main topics of interest of the workshop were:•Web Mining: Web Usage Mining, Web Classification, Web Clustering, Resource Discovery,
Web Personalization, Web Data Extraction, Web Structure Mining;•Web and XML Data Management: Web Data Models and Meta-data, XML Query
Languages, XML Data Storage Systems, XML Indexing, XML Warehousing, XML Data
Integration;•Semantic Web: Web Annotation, Ontologies, Semantic Web Services;

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Vol. 40 No. 1 June 2006•Web Commerce: Web Services, Intelligent Agents on the Web, Web Site Modeling andDesign, Advanced XML Tools, Mobile Commerce;•Advanced Web Applications: Digital Libraries, Web Portals, Intelligent Web Search Engines,Web Visualization Tools, Web Information Filtering;•Web Exploration: Web crawling, Intelligent Web Search Engines;•Performance of Web Applications: Web Caching, Web Monitoring.

Submissions covered most of the above topics with a predominance of papers on Web ranking andretrieval, XML data management and Web discovery, Web clustering and filtering. These seem to besome of the “hottest” topics that the community has been working on these days.

3Program Overview

All submitted papers were reviewed by three to four program committee members on a two roundreviewing, the second one for resolving discrepancies. The 12 accepted papers were divided into
three technical sessions.
The first session, on Web Ranking and Retrieval, included the papers “Web path recommendations
based on page ranking and Markov models” by Magdalini Eirinaki, Michalis Vazirgiannis andDimitris Kapogiannis from Greece, “Semantic Similarity Methods in WordNet and their Application
to Information Retrieval on the Web” by Giannis Varelas, Epimenidis Voutsakis, Paraskevi
Raftopoulou, Euripides G.M. Petrakis and Evangelos Milios from Greece and Canada, and“DirectoryRank: Bringing Order to Web Directories” by Vlassis Krikos, Sofia Stamou, Alenxandros
Ntoulas, Pavlos Kokosis and Dimitris Christodoulakis from Greece and USA.
The second session, on XML Data Management and Web Discovery comprised the papers“Exploiting Native XML Indexing Techniques for XML Retrieval in Relational Database Systems,” byFelix Weigel, Klaus U. Schultz and Holger Meuss from Germany, “Query Translation Scheme for
Heterogeneous XML Data Sources” by Cindy X. Chen, George A. Mihaila, Sriram Padmanabhan andIsabelle M. Rouvellou from USA, “Impact of XML Schema Evolution on Valid Documents” byGiovanna Guerrini, Marco Mesiti and Daniele Rossi from Italy, and “A Framework for Semantic Web
Services Discovery” by Jyotishman Pathak, Neeray Koul, Doina Caragea and Vasant G. Honavarfrom USA.
The last session, on Web Clustering, Filtering and Applications, consisted of “Narrative Text
Classification for Automatic Key Phrase Extraction in Web Document Corpora,” by Yongzheng
Zhang, Nur Zincir-Heywood and Evangelios Milios from Canada, “On improving Local WebsiteSearch Using Web Server Traffic Logs: A preliminary Report,” by Qing Cui and Alex Dekhtyar fromUSA, “Preventing Shilling Attacks in Online Recommender Systems,” by Cristian Zamfir, PaulAlexandru Chirita, and Wolfgang Nejdl from Germany, “Looking at Both the Present and the Past toEfficiently Update Replicas of Web Content” by Luciano Barbosa, Ana Carolina Salgado, Franscisco
de Carvahlo, Jacques Robin and Juliana Freire from USA and Brazil, and “A Search Result
Clustering Method using Informatively Named Entities” by Hitoyuki Toda and Ryoji Kataoka fromJapan.
In addition to the technical sessions, the workshop also included a keynote address on “A Web ofData; New Architectures for New Technology?”, which was presented by Prof. Donald Kossmannfrom ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The development and evolution that the Web has undergone this last
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decade has not been coupled with an evolution of construction methods of Web applications. To sucha purpose, imperative programming languages (e.g., Java or C#) and middleware architectures arestill dominant in industry. His talk discussed why these old architectures are problematic and spurredinteresting ideas for novel software architectures to build Web applications.
His talk was immediately followed by several questions from the workshop audience on the major
research issues behind this technology and its future interesting directions.

4 Conclusions
WIDM 2005 provided a stimulating environment for discussing and disseminating ideas on important
issues on Web information and data management. The next WIDM workshop will be held together
with CIKM 2006 (http://www.cikm.org/CIKM2006-CFP.pdf) in Arlington (VA), USA on November
10, 2006. A new workshop co-chair, Irini Fundulaki, from University of Edinburgh, UK, has been
recruited and will replace Dongwon Lee. WIDM 2006 call-for-paper will be announced soon.

5 References[1] Laender, A.H.F. and Lee, D. (eds.). Proceedings of Sixth ACM International Workshop on Web
Information and Data Management (WIDM 2005), November 5, 2005, Bremen, Germany, ACM
Press.

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