This book grew out of the First Symposium on the Personal Web, co-located with CASCON 2010 in Markham, Ontario, Canada. The purpose of the symposium was to bring together prominent researchers and practitioners from a diverse range of research areas relevant to the advancement of science and practice relating to the Personal Web. Research on the Personal Web is an outgrowth of the Smart Internet initiative, which seeks to extend and transform the web to be centred on the user, with the web as a calm platform ubiquitously providing cognitive support to its user and his or her tasks. As with the preceding SITCON workshop (held at CASCON 2009), this symposium involved a multi-disciplinary effort that brought together researchers and practitioners in data integration; web services modelling and architecture; human-computer interaction; predictive analytics; cloud infrastructure; semantics and ontology; and industrial application domains such as health care and finance. The discussions during the symposium dealt with different aspects of the architecture and functionality needed to make the Personal Web a reality. After the symposium the authors reworked their presentations into draft chapters that were submitted for peer evaluation and review. Every chapter went through two rounds of reviewing by at least two independent expert reviewers, and accepted chapters were then revised and are presented in this book.

The moment nineteen-year-old Joanna sets foot in America in 1969, she begins a ride of epic proportions. The Lesson of the Lost Horse sweeps readers into the heart and mind of the young Chinese immigrant to tell the story of her culture shock and her plunge into the maelstrom of America's gender revolution-when female workers begin to enter management ranks in the 1970s. From her first job as a waitress to her ascent into the high-tech world of cell-phones and wireless communications, Joanna embarks on an extraordinary journey filled with unexpected twists and turns, determined to prove to the world-and to herself-that she is worthy of the American dream. Born in an era of poverty in the Chinese-Portuguese colony of Macau, Joanna leaves home at seventeen to take a job as a schoolteacher in Hong Kong. When she stumbles onto a chance to come to America, she packs up her sheltered, old-world upbringing and arrives in America knowing no one, speaking little English, and with only ninety dollars in her pocket. With each life-changing episode that threatens to break her, Joanna finds the power to change her destiny, and a transformation begins to take place within this timid, shy woman who only dreams of being loved and happy. The Lesson of the Lost Horse is a triumphant memoir of a woman's will to survive and to succeed. At once an inspirational nothing-to-something tale and a heartwarming love story, it is also the story of one woman's search for her Chinese-American identity.