This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Web Intelligence Conference, AWIC 2004, held in Cancun, Mexico, in May 2004. The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on collaborative filtering and recommendation, supporting Web communities, multi-agent systems, soft computing methods, text processing and semantic Web, Web information retrieval, and categorization and ranking.

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the 2003 Atlantic Web Intelligence C- ference, AWIC 2003. The conference was located in Madrid, Spain during May 5–6, 2003, organized locally by the Technical University of Madrid. AWIC 2003 aimed to be the rst of a series of conferences on Web Intelligence, to be celebrated annually, alternatively in Europe and America, starting in Madrid. It was born as an activity of the recently created WIC-Poland Research Centre and the WIC-Spain Research Centre, bothbelongingtotheWebIntelligenceConsortium(WIC) (http://wi-consortium.org).AWIC 2003 was supported with grants from the S- nish Ministry for Science and Technology and the European Network of Excellence in Knowledge Discovery, KDNet. AWIC 2003 brought together scientists, engineers, computer users, and students to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and research results about all aspects (theory,applications,andtools)ofarti cialintelligencetechniquesappliedtoWeb-based systems, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered and the solutions adopted. Almost 70 contributions were submitted. After a preliminary evaluation, 60 of these papers were accepted to the conference and were assigned at least two reviewers from the international program committee. Out of this 60, 33 were conditionally accepted, and 32 of them were nally accepted after the conditions set by the reviewers had been met, which resulted in an acceptance ratio of 45%.

In recent years the Internet has become a source of data and information of indisputable importance and has immensely gained in acceptance and popularity. The World Wide Web (WWW or Web, for short), frequently named “the nervous system of the infor- tion society,” offers numerous valuable services leaving no doubt about the signi?cance of the Web in our daily activities at work and at home. Consequently, we have a clear aspiration to meet the obvious need for effective use of its potential by making - provements in both the methods and the technology applied. Among the new research directions observable in Web-related applications, intelligent methods from within the broadly perceived topic of soft computing occupy an important place. AWIC, the “Atlantic Web Intelligence Conferences” are intended to be a forum for exchange of new ideas and novel practical solutions in this new and exciting ?eld. The conference was born as an initiative of the WIC-Poland and the WIC-Spain Research Centres, both belonging to the Web Intelligence Consortium – WIC (http://wi-consortium.org/). So far, three AWIC conferences have been held: in Madrid, Spain (2003), in Cancun, Mexico (2004), and in ?ódz, ́ Poland (2005).

This book introduces a research applications in Web intelligence. It presents a number of innovative proposals which will contribute to the development of web science and technology for the long-term future, rendering this work a valuable piece of knowledge.

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.

This research volume focuses on analyzing the web user browsing behaviour and preferences in traditional web-based environments, social networks and web 2.0 applications, by using advanced techniques in data acquisition, data processing, pattern extraction and cognitive science for modeling the human actions. The book is directed to graduate students, researchers/scientists and engineers interested in updating their knowledge with the recent trends in web user analysis, for developing the next generation of web-based systems and applications.