The LNCS Journal on Data Semantics is devoted to the presentation of notable work that, in one way or another, addresses research and development on issues related to data semantics. Based on the highly visible publication platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, this new journal is widely disseminated and available worldwide.

The scope of the journal ranges from theories supporting the formal definition of semantic content to innovative domain-specific applications of semantic knowledge. The journal addresses researchers and advanced practitioners working on the semantic web, interoperability, mobile information services, data warehousing, knowledge representation and reasoning, conceptual database modeling, ontologies, and artificial intelligence.

We have described the development of a new micro-payment system, NetPay, f- turing different ways of managing electronic money, or e-coins. NetPay provides an off-line, anonymous protocol that supports high-volume, low-cost electronic trans- tions over the Internet. We developed three kinds of e-wallets to manage coins in a NetPay-based system: a sever-side e-wallet allowing multiple computer access to- coins; a client-side e-wallet allowing customer PC management of the e-coins, and a cookie-based e-wallet cache to improve performance of the client-side e-wallet c- munication overhead. Experiences to date with NetPay prototypes have demonstrated it provides an effective micro-payment strategy and customers welcome the ability to manage their electronic coins in different ways. References 1. Dai, X. and Lo, B.: NetPay - An Efficient Protocol for Micropayments on the WWW. Fifth Australian World Wide Web Conference, Australia (1999) 2. Dai, X., Grundy, J. and Lo, B.: Comparing and contrasting micro-payment models for- commerce systems, International Conferences of Info-tech and Info-net (ICII), China (2001) 3. Dai, X., Grundy, J.: Architecture of a Micro-Payment System for Thin-Client Web App- cations. In Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Internet Computing, Las Vegas, CSREA Press, June 24-27, 444--450 4. Dai, X. and Grundy J.: "Customer Perception of a Thin-client Micro-payment System Issues and Experiences," Journal of End User Computing, 15(4), pp 62-77, (2003).

The 2nd Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was held during June 16-17, 2003 in conjunction with CAiSE 2003, the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the Web to deliver their goods and services, to find trading partners, and to link their existing (maybe legacy) applications to other applications. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application fra- work. On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting software - plications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accumulated to demonstrate the difference between just having an online presence and using the Web as a stra- gic and functional medium in e-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.

WelcometotheproceedingsoftheinauguralInternationalConferenceonService- Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2003). This was the ?rst of a series of events that willevolveoverthecomingyears,andwewerehappytoholdtheeventinTrento, where the idea for this conference was born. Trento is a lovely city with many Renaissance buildings, testimony to its great medieval past, and has a bustling modern university ready to master the future. The participants visited Trento at the beginning of the winter season, with excellent opportunities for skiing and hiking. The city o?ers many other tourist attractions, some of which, we hope, the participants took the opportunity to enjoy. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is the new emerging paradigm for d- tributed computing and e-business processing which has evolved from obje- oriented and component computing to one that enables us to build agile n- works of collaborating business applications distributed within and across or- nizational boundaries. ICSOC aims to become the ?agship conference in the area of service-oriented computing,whichisattractingmoreandmoreresearchersandpractitionersfrom both academia and industry. The beginnings are extremely promising, beyond our most optimistic expectations. We were deluged by requests for further inf- mation from all parts of the world and by a very high number of submissions. In fact, the success of a conference depends on the quality of the papers and on the organizational e?orts of the conference o?cers and secretariat. On the research side, exciting new areas in service computing, including service modeling, composition, business transactions and collaborations, service developmentandmanagement,P2PandGridcomputing,mobilecomputing,and security, were reported in the conference, in conjunction with keynote addresses and informative tutorials o?ered by leaders in the ?eld.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2003, held in Xian, China in April 2003. The 39 revised full papers and 16 short papers presented together with two invited  papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 136 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML and database design; efficient XML data management; XML transformation; Web mining; Web clustering, ranking, and profiling; payment and security; Web application architectures; advanced applications; Web multimedia; network protocols; workflow management systems; advanced search; and data allocation and replication.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web, WES 2002, held in Toronto, Canada in May 2002 in conjunction with CAiSE 2002. The 18 revised full papers presented together with two keynote papers were carefully selected and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on web services, e-business, and e-services and the semantic web.

This volume contains papers presented during the science trace at the 4th International Conference of Business Information Systems, BIS 2000, held in Poznan, Poland, 12-13 April 2000, which discussed the development, implementation, applications and improvement of computer systems for business processes.
The papers deal with practical, industry experiences and validated prototype implementations, and cover areas such as integration of information systems, electronic transactions and banking, virtual organisations, network technologies, business information systems modelling and analysis.

Welcome to BIS'99! Business Information Systems 99 is an international conference being held for the third time. BIS'99 aims to discuss the development, implementation, application and improvement of computer systems for business processes. It is addressed to the scientific community, people involved in the development of business computer applications, and to consultants helping to properly implement computer technology and applications in industry. Over 50 selected papers will be presented at BIS'99 during the scientific and practical sessions. The papers deal with a variety of topics related to computer systems in management, from the point of view of their application (e.g., electronic commerce), their business or industrial users (e.g., business process re-engineering), and technology (e.g., data warehousing). The submitted papers underwent a rigorous reviewing process, and the resulting program should provide an outstanding representation of international research in this area. We believe that BIS'99 will provoke some interesting international discussion amongst participants, particularly as this meeting includes a number of invited lectures by international experts in the area. The BIS'99 international Program Committee was composed of 53 scientists from diverse locations -from the USA to Australia, from countries with a stable economy through to those undergoing economic transformation. This aspect further helps to enrich the conference program.

The papers published here highlight the contributions of leading researchers in the field who are working with object-oriented technology, theory and practice. Among the topics to be covered are: object-relational data technology; distributed object computing; patterns and frameworks; concepts and methodologies; multimedia systems; object-0riented metrics; object reuse; object ontologies; business process re-design; knowledge management; object database management systems; and interoperability issues. Areas of significant interest to industry, especially in providing innovative directions for the development of next generation systems, are also covered.