Editorial

Citation

Khalil, I. (2009), "Editorial", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 5 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijwis.2009.36205daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Web Information Systems, Volume 5, Issue 4

This is the final issue of volume 5 of the International Journal of Web Information Systems (IJWIS), which culminates the fifth year of this journal which has proved to be a premium journal publishing high quality papers, disseminating knowledge on an international basis in the wide and challenging areas of web information systems and serving as an excellent channel for communicating and exchanging ideas among researchers, academics, and practitioners who work, teach, study, and research in web technology and systems. Continuing IJWIS tradition of publishing tutorial and survey papers in each issue of on the state of the art research on web information systems contributed by well-known experts in the respective areas, the survey paper for this issue is entitled “Ontology-based activity recognition in intelligent pervasive environments” contributed by Liming Chen and Chris Nugent, from the School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster, UK. This paper thoroughly and extensively provides an overview about the state of the art of activity recognition, in particular, in the area of object-based activity recognition, aiming to inform relevant research communities of the latest development and also provide a reference for researchers and system developers towards the design and development of activity-based context aware applications. The paper introduces a novel approach to activity recognition making extensive use of ontological modeling, representation and reasoning, aiming to consolidate and improve existing approaches in terms of scalability, applicability and easy-of-use. This comprehensive overview and critiques on existing work on activity recognition provides a valuable reference for researchers and system developers in related research communities. The proposed ontology-based approach to activity recognition, in particular the recognition algorithm built upon description logic based semantic reasoning, offers a promising alternative to traditional probabilistic methods. In addition, ADL activity ontologies in the context of smart homes have not been seen elsewhere.

The second paper “A structural, content-similarity measure for detecting spam documents on the web” by Maria Soledad Pera and Yiu-Kai Ng from Brigham Young University, USA presents a novel approach for identifying spam web documents, which have mismatched titles and bodies and/or low percentage of hidden content in markup data structure. By considering the content and markup of web documents, the authors develop a spam-detection tool that is reliable, since it can accurately detect 84.5 percent of spam/legitimate web documents, and computational inexpensive, since the word-correlation factors used for content analysis are pre-computed. As a result, this spam-detection approach outperforms existing anti-spam methods by at least 3 percent in terms of F-measure.

The third paper “Schema-level access control policies for XML documents ” by Tomasz Müldner (Acadia University, Canada), Gregory Leighton (University of Alberta, Canada), and Jan Krzysztof Miziołek (University of Warsaw, Poland) considers the secure publishing of XML documents, where a single copy of an XML document is disseminated and a stated role-based access control policy is enforced via selective encryption. The paper describes a more efficient solution over previously proposed approaches, in which both policy specification and key generation are performed once, at the schema-level. In lieu of the commonly used super-encryption technique, in which nodes residing in the intersection of multiple roles are encrypted with multiple keys, we describe a new approach called multi-encryption that guarantees each node is encrypted at most once. Two alternative algorithms for key generation and single-pass algorithms for multi-encrypting and decrypting a document are described which result in a smaller number of keys being distributed to each user.

The fourth paper “Maintaining web application: an ontology-based reverse engineering approach” by Sidi Mohamed Benslimane, Mimoun Malki, and Djelloul Bouchiha from the University of Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria presents an ontology-based reverse engineering approach that help understanding existing undocumented web applications to be maintained or evolved. The proposed approach provides a reverse engineering rules to generate a conceptual schema from a given domain ontology by using a set of transformation rules. The reverse engineering process consists of four phases: extracting useful information; identifying a set of ontological constructs representing the concepts of interest; enriching the identified set by additional constructs; and finally deriving a conceptual schema. As a result, the conceptual data model is made faster, easier and with fewer errors than creating it in usual way. Designers can use the extracted conceptual schema to gain a better understanding of web applications and to assist in their maintenance.

The final paper in this issue “Automation of post-exploitation” by Mohammad Tabatabai Irani and Edgar R. Weippl from Security Research, Austria, builds on existing frameworks for pentesting such as Metasploit and Meterpreter by extending Metapreter-scripts so that post-exploitation can be scripted. Moreover, using a multi-step approach (pivoting), it can automatically exploit machines that are not directly routable: Once the first machine is exploited, the script continues to then automatically launch an attack on the next machine, etc.

Ismail KhalilCo-Editor-in-Chief