Special Issue on Web Site Evolution (WSE 2006)
Davide Bolchini, Thomas Roy Dean, Damiano Distante, Scott Tilley · Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution Research and Practice · 2007
This special issue features extended versions of selected papers from the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Web Site Evolution (WSE 2006) that was held in Philadelphia PA, on 23-24 September 2006.The symposium was co-located with the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2006).Since its inception in 1999, the Web Site Evolution (WSE) series of events have provided a forum for researchers and practitioners from the communities of Software Maintenance and Evolution and Web Engineering to present original work and discuss subjects related to the disciplined evolution of large-scale Web sites.Researchers and practitioners working in the areas of Web application design, development, maintenance, and evolution attend WSE to discuss results and exchange experiences about models, methods, tools, and technologies related to the above-mentioned areas.In particular, the last editions of WSE have represented a significant step in making the WSE community more and more interdisciplinary, building bridges with various areas such as communication, HCI, usability, and quality and maintenance.We wish to maintain and enrich this multi-faceted spirit of the community, as well as to reach and involve other researchers and practitioners in this effort.WSE began as a one-day workshop, but, thanks to the success in terms of attendance and number of submissions, in 2006 it expanded into a two-day symposium to include keynote presentations, technical sessions, working sessions, and panels discussions.Out of 31 submissions, 13 excellent papers were selected to be presented at the symposium.The accepted papers covered a broad range of topics of the whole life cycle of Web systems, from design to implementation, evaluation, and maintenance, including: Modeling and Architecture, Web Trends and Technology, Accessibility and User Behavior, Comprehension, Testing and Security.The WSE 2006 program also included two inspiring keynotes: 'Model Driven Evolution of Network-Centric Applications: Perspectives, Applications, and Issues' by Kostas Kontogiannis, and 'Knowing Your Online Readership, Organizing Your Communication' by Lorenzo Cantoni.After the symposium, five outstanding papers were selected by the program chairs for invitation to this special issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice.The authors of the selected papers were asked to prepare a significant extension on the symposium version of their papers.Each paper underwent a rigorous reviewing process, involving three independent reviewers and two rounds of revisions.Eventually, four papers were accepted for inclusion in this special issue, covering four different topics of Web systems maintenance and evolution: Comprehension, Testing, Empirical Studies, and Patterns.During Web application re-engineering, a common activity is to identify similar content located in different static and dynamically generated Web pages, so that the content can be more effectively reused.The paper 'Identifying Similar Pages of Web Applications using a Competitive Clustering