The rapid development of Web technology has made the World Wide Web an important and popular application platform for disseminating information, searching for information as well as for conducting business. The ubiquitous Web has become somewhat indispensable for many and varied sectors. The web also creates new challenges for information management and (business) transaction/service management; namely, for researchers, developers and content and service providers, to improve the Web to meet the needs of user/consumers.  The following are some of the challenges and research issues in this area that EII will be investigating.
   
Semantic Web and Ontology: The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processed by machines on a global scale, and is an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web. Organisational knowledge typically comes from numerous independent sources, each with its own semantics. Users now have access to unprecedented amounts of media data, but it is increasingly difficult to integrate relevant media from multiple and diverse sources. Information from large numbers of such sources needs to be associated, organised, and merged. The functioning of an automated multi-modal integration system requires metadata, such as ontologies, that describes media resources. Such metadata is generally application dependent and this can cause difficulties when media needs to be shared across application domains. The relationships among the ontology fragments indicate the relationships among the sources, enabling the source information to be categorised and organised. EII will investigate the mapping and relationships among different ontologies.
   
Web services and service transaction management: Web services have evolved as a dominant computing paradigm for integrating business processes and applications across organisational boundaries on the Web. Due to the loosely coupled nature of Web services, traditional and many extended transaction models have proven inappropriate for providing transaction services in this setting. As such, several proposals have been put forward. Among them are WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction, Transaction Internet Protocol (TIP), OASIS BTP, and Tentative Hold Protocol. While these protocols provide certain transaction support to business processes in the Web service environment, they are neither effective nor flexible; they are actually not suitable, or not even applicable, to some business process scenarios. EII will analyse various transaction requirements from Web services and Web service composition/coordination that will be used for business processes.
   
Web-based query processing & information retrieval: The growth of the Web has dramatically changed the way information is accessed and managed, thereby opening the door to exciting new scenarios for the widespread consumption and exchange of information. Along with the excitement, there is also the recognition of an urgent need for effective and efficient tools for information consumers, who must be able to easily locate, manage and exchange disparate information, ranging from unstructured documents and pictures to structured, but often hidden, record-oriented data. Performance and accuracy is now a critical issue in web-based information retrieval and applications.

Program Coordinator

Prof. Yanchun Zhang is the Director of Internet Technologies and Applications Research Lab in the School of Computer Science and Mathematics at Victoria University. He was a research fellow at UQ and CRC Distributed Distributed Systems Technology from 1991 to 1993,  and an academic member (lecturer, senior lecturer and then associate professor) in the Department of Mathematics and Computing at University of Southern Queensland from 1994 to June 2003. He has been active in areas of database and information systems, distributed databases, Web and internet technologies, Web information systems, Web data management, Web mining, Web search,  Web services, and e-Research.