The success of the World Wide Web depends on the ability of users to store, p- cess and retrieve digital information regardless of distance boundaries, languages and domains of knowledge. The universality and ?exibility of the World Wide Web have also enabled the rapid growth of a variety of new services and applications based on human-machine interaction. The semantics of exchanged information and services should be useful not only for human to human communications, but also in that machines would be able to understand and automatically process web content. Semanticsgive well-de?nedmeaningto web content and enable computersand p- ple to work in cooperation. Today, the crucial challenge becomes the development of languages to express information in a machine processable format. Now more than ever, new advanced techniques and intelligent approaches are required to tra- form the Web into a universal reasoning and computing machine. Web intelligence attempts to deal with this challenge by exploiting information technologies and - ti?cial intelligence approaches to design the next generation of web-empowered systems and services.

Richard Chbeir, Youakim Badr, Ajith Abraham, and Aboul-Ella Hassanien Abstract As the Web continues to grow and evolve, more and more data are becoming available. Particularly, multimedia and XML-based data are produced regularly and in increasing way in our daily digital activities, and their retrieval and access must be explored and studied in this emergent web-based era. This book provides reviews of the cutting-edge technologies and insights of various topics related to XML-based and multimedia information access and retrieval under the umbrella of Web Intelligence and reporting how organizations can gain compe- tive advantages by applying new different emergent techniques in the real-world scenarios. The primary target audience for the book includes researchers, scholars, postgraduate students and developers who are interested in advanced information retrieval on the web research and related issues. 1 Introduction Since the last two decades, Internet has changed our daily life by rede?ning the meanings and processes of business, commerce, marketing, ?nance, publishing, R. Chbeir Universite ' de Bourgogne, LE2I-UMR CNRS 5158, Fac. de Sciences Mirande, 21078 Dijon Cedex, France e-mail: richard. chbeir@u-bourgogne. fr Y. Badr INSA de Lyon, Universite ' de Lyon, Depart ' ement Informatique, 7 avenue Jean Capelle, 69621 Villeurbanne CX, France e-mail: youakim. badr@insa-lyon. fr A. Abraham Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Center for Quanti?able Quality of Service in Communication Systems, O. S. Bragstads plass 2E, 7491 Trondheim, Norway e-mail: ajith. abraham@ieee. org A. -E. Hassanien Kuwait University, College of Business & Administration, Dept.

Richard Chbeir, Youakim Badr, Ajith Abraham, and Aboul-Ella Hassanien Abstract As the Web continues to grow and evolve, more and more data are becoming available. Particularly, multimedia and XML-based data are produced regularly and in increasing way in our daily digital activities, and their retrieval and access must be explored and studied in this emergent web-based era. This book provides reviews of the cutting-edge technologies and insights of various topics related to XML-based and multimedia information access and retrieval under the umbrella of Web Intelligence and reporting how organizations can gain compe- tive advantages by applying new different emergent techniques in the real-world scenarios. The primary target audience for the book includes researchers, scholars, postgraduate students and developers who are interested in advanced information retrieval on the web research and related issues. 1 Introduction Since the last two decades, Internet has changed our daily life by rede?ning the meanings and processes of business, commerce, marketing, ?nance, publishing, R. Chbeir Universite ' de Bourgogne, LE2I-UMR CNRS 5158, Fac. de Sciences Mirande, 21078 Dijon Cedex, France e-mail: richard. chbeir@u-bourgogne. fr Y. Badr INSA de Lyon, Universite ' de Lyon, Depart ' ement Informatique, 7 avenue Jean Capelle, 69621 Villeurbanne CX, France e-mail: youakim. badr@insa-lyon. fr A. Abraham Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Center for Quanti?able Quality of Service in Communication Systems, O. S. Bragstads plass 2E, 7491 Trondheim, Norway e-mail: ajith. abraham@ieee. org A. -E. Hassanien Kuwait University, College of Business & Administration, Dept.