The goal of this book is to present a framework within which the myriad of office technologies and office systems design techniques can be better understood. There are a number of office books which deal with the social/organizational aspects of office automation or with office equip ment introduction strategies. This book differs from those in that it is written by technical computer people for technical computer people. As such, it assumes a general computer literacy and contains a technical emphasis with a social fiber woven in. Besides the framework, we also present the current state of office primitives, office tools, and office tech nology. We cover relevant work on-going by international standards bod ies, and we discuss the concepts that are emerging (or which we feel will be emerging) from universities and industrial research laboratories. Office technologies and techniques are classified as personal environment aids versus communal environment aids. We now fully realize how difficult it is to write a coherent book within this fuzzy, interdisciplinary, rapidly changing field. Concepts have been stressed wherever possible; there are some sub-areas where the generaliz ing concepts have not yet emerged. We also realize the potential danger of obsolescense. We have tried to combate this somewhat by the presen tation of concepts, generic tool design, and emphasizing our framework. This book is not a substitute for reading of the current periodical litera ture - that is where the most timely information lies."

This book constitutes the refereed combined proceedings of four international workshops held in conjunction with the joint 9th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2007, and the 8th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2007, held in Huang Shan, China in June 2007 (see LNCS 4505).

The 50 revised full papers and 25 revised short papers presented together with the abstract of 1 keynote talk were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 266 submissions. The papers of the four workshops are very specific and contribute to enlarging the spectrum of the more general topics treated in the APWeb 2007 and WAIM 2007 main conferences. Topics addressed by the workshops are: Database Management and Application over Networks (DBMAN 2007), Emerging Trends of Web Technologies and Applications (WebETrends 2007), Process Aware Information Systems (PAIS 2007), and Application and Security Service in Web and Pervasive Environments (ASWAN 2007).