With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo , are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications.

Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search.

The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.

The book deals with the propagation and absorption of high frequency waves in plasmas (hot, fully ionized gases). Research in this field is very active in controlled fusion research, i.e. the quest for energy from nuclear reactions similar to those going on within the sun, and in astrophysics, i.e. the study of space plasmas in the earth ionosphere, stars, and galaxies. The text collects in a structured and self-contained way the basic knowledge on the broad and varied behaviour of plasma waves, adopting the microscopic kinetic description of the plasma as unifying principle. The internal coherence of the theory is explicity stressed, and very interesting physical phenomena peculiar to plasmas, such as collisionless damping of waves, the development of stochasticity in the interactions of charged particles with electromagnetic waves, and nonlinear interactions between waves, are discussed in detail. The most common and useful approximations used in solving practical problems are derived as special cases from the more general kinetic approach, thereby clarifying their meaning and domain of applicability. This exposition should be useful to plasma physicists both as an introduction and a reference to this field of research. Because of its multi-disciplinary aspects it might also be of interest to people specializing in kinetic theory, classical electromagnetism, or classical mechanics, as a nontrivial example of application of the methods of these fields to the unconventional plasma medium.

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications. Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search. The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.

Search computing, which has evolved from service computing, focuses on building the answers to complex search queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using the ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The field is multi-disciplinary in nature and takes advantage of contributions from other research areas such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economics, and legal sciences. This book is the third in the Search Computing series and contains a collection of 16 papers, which in most cases were contributed to several workshops during 2011 organized by members of the Search Computing project in the context of major international conferences: ExploreWeb at ICWE 2011, Very Large Data Search and DBRank at VLDB 2011, DATAVIEW at ECOWS 2011, and OrdRing at ISWC 2011. The papers provide very useful insights on search computing problems and issues. The book has been divided into four parts focussing on: extraction and integration; query and visualization paradigms; exploring linked data; and games, social search and economics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2012, held in Berlin, Germany, in July 2012. The 20 revised full papers and 15 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 98 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on social networks and collaboration, tagging, personalization and personal systems, search, Web modeling, AJAX and user interfaces, Web services, Web crawling, and Web and linked data management. The book also includes 6 poster papers, 12 demos and 5 tutorials.

Search computing, which has evolved from service computing, focuses on building the answers to complex search queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The field is multi-disciplinary in nature, and takes advantage of contributions from other research areas such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economics and legal sciences. The book is divided into three parts. The first part includes some visionary contributions on the latest trends in search, which is becoming increasingly task-oriented and is starting to use ontological knowledge in order to manage complex queries. The second part explores background and related technologies, which can be considered as parallel fields of research, useful both for setting the theoretical premises for search computing and for providing a technological framework for building search computing systems and applications. The third part delves into the conceptual and technological problems and issues arising when dealing with search computing as a new search paradigm. It provides a unified view of the results of the Search Computing project as achieved exactly one year after its starting date.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2021, which was supposed to be held in Biarritz, France, in May 2021. Due to the corona pandemic the conference changed to a virtual format.The total of 22 full and 13 short contributions presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 128 submissions. The book also contains 6 demonstration, 1 poster, 3 PhD, and 3 tutorial papers. The papers were organized in topical sections named: Semantic Web; social Web; Web modeling and engineering; Web big data and data analytics; Web mining and knowledge extraction; Web of Things; Web programming; Web user interfaces; PhD symposium; posters and demonstrations; and tutorials. Chapter "A Web-Based Co-Creation and User Engagement Method and Platform" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2019, held in Daejeon, South Korea, in June 2019. The 11 revised full papers were selected from 25 submissions. The workshops complement the main conference and explore new trends on core topics of Web engineering and provide an open discussion space combining solid theory work with practical on-the-field experience. The workshop committee accepted three workshops for publication in this volume: 5th International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery on the Web (KDWEB 2019), Second International Workshop on Maturity of Web Engineering Practices (MATWEP 2019), International Workshop on Data Science and Knowledge Graph (DSKG 2019).

Interaction Flow Modeling Language describes how to apply model-driven techniques to the problem of designing the front end of software applications, i.e., the user interaction. The book introduces the reader to the novel OMG standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML). Authors Marco Brambilla and Piero Fraternali are authors of the IFML standard and wrote this book to explain the main concepts of the language. They effectively illustrate how IFML can be applied in practice to the specification and implementation of complex web and mobile applications, featuring rich interactive interfaces, both browser based and native, client side components and widgets, and connections to data sources, business logic components and services. Interaction Flow Modeling Language provides you with unique insight into the benefits of engineering web and mobile applications with an agile model driven approach. Concepts are explained through intuitive examples, drawn from real-world applications. The authors accompany you in the voyage from visual specifications of requirements to design and code production. The book distills more than twenty years of practice and provides a mix of methodological principles and concrete and immediately applicable techniques.

Search computing, which has evolved from service computing, focuses on building the answers to complex search queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using the ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The field is multi-disciplinary in nature and takes advantage of contributions from other research areas such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economics, and legal sciences. This book, the second in the Search Computing series, describes the evolution of theories, technologies, and methods related to search computing. The book has been divided into eight parts, reflecting the main research directions within the Search Computing project. The parts focus on: search as an information exploration task; interaction design issues when dealing with multi-domain search results; modeling and semantic description of search services; the rank-join problem; query processing techniques and architectures; tools and mashups for application development; the application of search computing to bio-informatics; and the exploitation potentials of project results.

The most prominent Web applications in use today are data-intensive. Scores of database management systems across the Internet access and maintain large amounts of structured data for e-commerce, on-line trading, banking, digital libraries, and other high-volume sites.
Developing and maintaining these data-intensive applications is an especially complex, multi-disciplinary activity, requiring all the tools and techniques that software engineering can provide. This book represents a breakthrough for Web application developers. Using hundreds of illustrations and an elegant intuitive modeling language, the authors-all internationally-known database researchers-present a methodology that fully exploits the conceptual modeling approach of software engineering, from idea to application. Readers will learn not only how to harness the design technologies of relational databases for use on the Web, but also how to transform their conceptual designs of data-intensive Web applications into effective software components.
* A fully self-contained introduction and practitioner's guide suitable for both technical and non-technical members of staff, as well as students.
* A methodology, development process, and notation (WebML) based on common practice but optimized for the unique challenges of high-volume Web applications.
* Completely platform- and product-independent; even the use of WebML is optional.
* Based on well-known industry standards such as UML and the Entity Relationship Model.
* Enhanced by its own Web site (http: //www.webml.org), containing additional examples, papers, teaching materials, developers' resources, and exercises with solutions.