Information is becoming the raw material of modern society; it is the driving force of modern service industries. Our information spaces have been pervaded by technology and are characterized by their increasing size and complexity. Furthermore, access to information spaces and the ability to use them effectively and efficiently have become key economic success factors. Interdisciplinary Advances in Adaptive and Intelligent Assistant Systems: Concepts, Techniques, Applications, and Use encourages knowledge on effective and efficient approaches to accessing information spaces. It fosters an emerging key competence: accessing and processing large, highly complex corpora of information by applying collaborative, intelligent technical systems. It is the mission of this book to trigger interdisciplinary research and cooperation at the intersection between information sciences, information technologies and communication sciences. This publication also raises awareness of the field s importance in business and management communities, thus contributing to the dissemination of scientific ideas and insights.

The lives of people all around the world, especially in industrialized nations, continue to be changed by the presence and growth of the Internet. Its in?uence is felt at scales ranging from private lifestyles to national economies, boosting thepaceatwhichmoderninformationandcommunicationtechnologiesin?uence personal choices along with business processes and scienti?c endeavors. In addition to its billions of HTML pages, the Web can now be seen as an open repository of computing resources. These resources provide access to computational services as well as data repositories, through a rapidly growing variety of Web applications and Web services. However, people's usage of all these resources barely scratches the surface of the possibilities that such richness should o?er. One simple reason is that, given the variety of information available and the rate at which it is being extended, it is di?cult to keep up with the range of resources relevant to one's interests. Another reason is that resources are o?ered in a bewildering variety of formats and styles, so that many resources e?ectively stand in isolation. This is reminiscent of the challenge of enterprise application integration, - miliar to every large organization be it in commerce, academia or government. Thechallengearisesbecauseoftheaccumulationofinformationandcommuni- tion systems over decades, typically without the technical provision or political will to make them work together. Thus the exchange of data among those s- tems is di?cult and expensive, and the potential synergetic e?ects of combining them are never realized.