This book examines paintings using a computational and quantitative approach. Specifically, it compares paintings to photographs, addressing the strengths and limitations of both. Particular aesthetic practices are examined such as the vista, foreground to background organisation and the depth planes. These are analysed using a range of computational approaches and clear observations are made. New generations of image-capture devices such as Google goggles and the light field camera, promise a future in which the formal attributes of a photograph are made available for editing to a degree that has hitherto been the exclusive territory of painting. In this sense paintings and photographs are converging, and it therefore seems an opportune time to study the comparisons between them. In this context, the book includes cutting-edge work examining how some of the aesthetic attributes of a painting can be transferred to a photograph using the latest computational approaches.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the workshops held at the 17th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2015, in Guangzhou, China, in September 2015. The 15 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The volume presents the papers that have been accepted for the following workshops: Big Data Applications in Telecoms, BDAT 2015, Big Social Data, BSD 2015, and Web Data Mining and Applications, WDMA 2015. The papers cover various issues in the area of the World Wide Web with the underlying technologies and applications.