R. Akerkar, V. Ermolayev, N. Bassiliades, “Editorial of Special issue on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics”, International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, World Scientific, 24 (2), pp. 1502002, 2015.
This special issue of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT) focused on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS). Web intelligence (WI), as a research direction, has a broad agenda dealing with the issues that arise around the WWW phenomenon [1]. It is a converging research area bringing together several research communities, such as Databases (DB), Information Retrieval (IR), Semantic Technologies (ST), Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mention a few. To facilitate this convergence, the WIMS community started the conference series in 2011 on web intelligence, web mining and web semantics. For the Web to reach its full potential and gain intelligence, we need to enhance its services, make it more comprehensible, and increase its usability. The WIMS community is interested in novel data architectures and infrastructures especially suited to meet the challenges of the Web, namely the enormous volumes of data, their dynamic nature, their explicit or implicit semantics, their integrity and provenance. Web intelligence is about applying artificial intelligence and information technology techniques on the Web in order to create novel, adaptive and smarter web-based products, services and frameworks. Especially for WIMS’14, the focus is on either using some new AI techniques for providing general purpose web intelligence, such as semantic agent systems or nature-inspired models, or using AI techniques for more specialized web research and application areas. The facet of web mining and extracting information and knowledge from the Web within the WIMS landscape covers several interrelated and vibrant research directions providing enabling technologies for web intelligence. In particular, the methods and technologies for mining content spanning across different modalities (multimedia) and being very dynamic in its nature or constrained in access time (data streams) gain increased attention in the research communities and more demand in industries. The Semantic Web vision emerged from the confluence of several communities – artificial intelligence, hypertext, web developers – and so there are a number of ways to realize its motivation and goals. The Semantic Web is an approach to encoding and publishing information in ways that makes it easier for computers to understand, thus making the Web agent-friendly [2]. The Semantic Web offers an ambitious vision of an internet populated with intelligent agents and services able to exchange information, tasks and knowledge using simple protocols coupled with a rich knowledge representation language. This special issue focuses on intelligent approaches, supported by tools, to transform the World Wide Web into a global reasoning and semantics-driven computing machine. This issue includes the articles which are the extended versions of the selected best papers from the 4th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS’14), Thessaloniki, Greece held on 02-04 June 2014.