Report on the Fourth International Workshop on Web Information andData Management (WIDM’2002)
Ee-Peng Lim
Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
aseplim@ntu.edu.sg
Roger Chiang Hsiang-Li
College of Business, University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, USARoger.Chiang@uc.edu

1Introduction

The Fourth International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM’2002) was
held at the SAIC Headquarters, McLean in Virginia on November 8, 2002. The workshop was held inconjunction with the International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management(CIKM’2002).
WIDM2002, compared to WIDM2001, has expanded its program to include 12 full paper and 6 shortpaper presentations. The workshop received 53 paper submissions from 21 countries, an increase of
50% over that of WIDM2001. The authors of these papers are from 9 countries. The twelve fullpapers were divided into 3 sessions: Advanced XML Technologies and Applications, Web Mining,and Web Services and Performance Evaluation. All short papers were presented in together in a
separate Short Papers session.

2Workshop Overview

The workshop included a keynote address on Improving Access to Scientific Literature by SteveLawrence from NEC Research Institute. As a key researcher and developer behind the CiteSeer
Scientific Literature Digital Library project, Steve gave a comprehensive overview of the design,
implementation and operation of the CiteSeer system. His interesting talk was immediately followed
by several questions from the workshop audience on the extraction and indexing techniques used inCiteSeer and its future directions.
The first session on Advanced XML Technologies and Applications consists of 4 paper presentations.
The paper, Consistently Updating XML Documents using Incremental Constraint CheckQueries by Kane, Su and Rundensteiner, describes a query rewriting approach to ensure safenessfor updates on XML documents. The second paper, Hybrid Applications over XML: Integrating
the Declarative and Navigational Approaches by Manghi, Simeoni, Lievens and Connor,
proposes a quasi-statically typed language for XML to allow XML data to be associated with different
structures and algebras. Zhang, Pielech and Rundensteiner, in the paper entitled Honey, I Shrunk
the XQuery! - An XML Algebra Optimization Approach, describes a new way to optimize
XQuery using query algebra. The paper, A Mapping Schema and Interface for XML by AmerYahia and Srivastava, addresses the problem of mapping XML data to relational schemas.
The second session entitled Web Mining began with the paper, Using Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA) to Find Different Names for the Same Entity in Free Text by Oates, Bhat and Shanbhag
describes a new technique based on LSA to identify names that correspond to the same entities. Thepaper also reports promising results using the proposed technique. The second paper, A Framework
for Web Table Mining by Yang and Luk investigate different ways to extract web table
information. In the paper, Effects of Maximum Flow Algorithm on Identifying Web Community,Imafuji and Kitsuregawa reports the results of using maximum flow algorithm to determine webcommunities. The last paper, Ranking User's Relevance to a Topic through Link Analysis onWeb Logs by Wang, Zheng, Li, Liu and Ma, proposes the use of a modified link analysis method todetermine user relevance to a given topic.

In the third session on Web Services and Performance Evaluation, the first paper entitled Preserving
Privacy in Web Services by Rezgui, Ouzzani, Bouguettaya and Medjahed proposes a web service
infrastructure that aims to protect privacy in an e-government context. The second paper, Indexing
Web Access-Logs for Pattern Queries by Nanopoulos, Manolopoulos, Zakrzewicz and Morzydescribes a new indexing technique for web access logs. The next paper Collecting Hidden Web
Pages for Data Extraction by Lage, Silva, Golgher and Laender investigates new ways to extract
information from hidden web sites. The last paper, A Fine-Grained Replacement Strategy for XML
Query Cache by Chen, Wang, Cash, Ryder, Hobbs and Rundensteiner, proposes a new cachereplacement strategy for XML data.
In the final short paper session, Ginsburg first presented the paper entitled The Catacomb Project:
Building a User-Centered Web Portal the Conversational Way. The next paper, An Algebraic
Approach for Incremental Maintenance of Materialized XQuery, by EL-Sayed, Wang, Ding,and Rundensteiner deals with the incremental update problem of materialized XQuery views. The
third paper by Liu, Ng, Li and Lim proposes A Visual Tool for Building Logical Data Models ofWebsites. This is followed by the paper on Web Classification Using Support Vector Machine bySun, Lim and Ng. The paper describes the feature engineering issues for web classification. Thepaper, Concept Extraction and Association from Cancer Literature by Fu, Bauer, Mostafa,
Palakal and Mukhopadhyay, attempts to relate different concepts found in biomedical literature.
The last paper, Design and Performance Evaluation of a Web-based Multi-Tier Federated
System for a Catalogue of Life by Xu, Jones , Gray, Fiddian, White and Bisby, presents a
distributed database architecture design for accessing biological data.

3Conclusions

At the end of WIDM’2002, a happy hour session was organized for the workshop participants at anearby restaurant. About 9 people turned up at the happy hour to enjoy the finger food and beers.
Some photographs have been posted at http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~eplim/widm2002.
At the time of writing this report, the next WIDM workshop has been finalized and will be held
together with CIKM’2003 in New Orleans, Lousiana (http://www.cikm.org/2003). A new workshop
co-chair, Alberto Laender, has been recruited, and the workshop call-for-paper announcement will beout soon. In WIDM2003, a two-day workshop program will be introduced to encourage more paper
submissions and participation.