Information is becoming the raw material of modern society; it is the driving force of modern service industries. Our information spaces have been pervaded by technology and are characterized by their increasing size and complexity. Furthermore, access to information spaces and the ability to use them effectively and efficiently have become key economic success factors. Interdisciplinary Advances in Adaptive and Intelligent Assistant Systems: Concepts, Techniques, Applications, and Use encourages knowledge on effective and efficient approaches to accessing information spaces. It fosters an emerging key competence: accessing and processing large, highly complex corpora of information by applying collaborative, intelligent technical systems. It is the mission of this book to trigger interdisciplinary research and cooperation at the intersection between information sciences, information technologies and communication sciences. This publication also raises awareness of the field s importance in business and management communities, thus contributing to the dissemination of scientific ideas and insights.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of UNISCON 2008 held in Klagenfurt, Austria, during April 22-25, 2008.

UNISCON combines the ECOMO workshop series and the ISTA conference series. The 19 papers dealing with conceptual modeling, model-driven software development and information systems applications represent a 30% selection from the original set of submissions.

They are completed by two keynote lectures and 35 papers from internationally renowned researchers, invited in honor of Heinrich C. Mayr, whose 60th birthday is also celebrated at this event, that he originally created.

This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the three workshops held in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2005, in New York, NY, USA, in November 2005.

A total of 47 papers were submitted to the three workshops, and 28 revised full papers were carefully selected for presentation. The workshop on Web Information Systems Quality (WISQ 2005) - discussing and disseminating research on the quality of WIS and Web services from a holistic point of view - included 7 papers out of 12 submissions. The workshop on Web-based Learning (WBL 2005) accounted for 10 papers from 14 papers submitted - organized in topical sections on tools, models, and innovative applications. The workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2005) included 11 presentations selected from 21 submissions. Topics addressed are scalable repository and reasoning services, practical Semantic Web applications, query handling and optimization techniques.

The study reported in this paper is an ongoing effort. We reported a preliminary analysis of the data in the paper. The current experiments varied the subjects to c- duct online group learning activities by the communication media such as email and threaded discussion. Although, we could have easily learned the impact of mobile devices in learning if we divided the subjects to use different hardware such as p- sonal computers, personal digital assistant, or mobile phones, we believe our findings will still be able to provide useful insights on the difficulties that the mobile learners will face in solving problems as a group. Our analysis result will also provide ba- line information on whether the traits of the successful or failed online groups are applicable to the mobile learners. For example, we expect the SMS will be a better medium to overcome the major problem of instant communication or the rapid propagation of the information as the mobile phones have built-in mechanism to remind the users of the incoming new messages and also the mobile phone users are expected to be interrupted for the incoming messages. However, we need further investigation of other problems, which hinder the optimum online group work. For example, 'accuracy of the transferred information' was identified as one of the pr- lems of using emails as the communication medium. Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or SMS are more apt to deliver shorter messages than the typical emails.