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.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2007, held in Como, Italy in July 2007.

The 26 revised full papers and 13 revised short papers presented together with 9 demonstration papers, 4 industrial papers, and 4 papers of the doctoral symposium, were carefully reviewed and selected from 172 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on services, metrics and quality, caching, interfaces, models, verification and testing, semantics and Web 2.0, search, application development, demonstrations, the industrial track, and the doctoral consortium.

Web engineering is a new discipline that addresses the pressing need for syst- atic and tool-supported approaches for the development, maintenance and te- ing of Web applications. Web engineering builds upon well-known and succe- ful software engineering principles and practices, adapting them to the special characteristics of Web applications. Even more relevant is the enrichment with methods and techniques stemming from related areas like hypertext authoring, human-computer interaction, content management, and usability engineering. The goal of the 4th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2004), inlinewiththepreviousICWEconferences, wastoworktowardsabetterund- standing of the issues related to Web application development. Special attention was paid to emerging trends, technologies and future visions, to help the a- demic and industrial communities identify the most challenging tasks for their research and projects. Following a number of successful workshops on Web engineering since 1997 at well-known conferences, such as ICSE and WWW, the ?rst conference on Web engineering was held in C aceres, Spain in 2001. It was followed by ICWE 2002 in Santa Fe, Argentina and ICWE 2003 in Oviedo, Spain. In 2004 ICWE moved to the center of Europe and was held in Munich, Germany from July 26 to 30. ICWE 2004 was organized by the Institute for Informatics of the Ludwig- Maximilians-Universit] at (LMU) Munich. The ICWE 2004 edition received a total of 204 submissions, out of which 25 paperswereselectedbytheProgramCommitteeasfullpapers(12%acceptance)."

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.

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.