International Workshop on Adaptation and Evolution in Web Systems Engineering (AEWSE2008)

In current and future Web applications, adaptation and evolution are important concerns.

Adaptation is not only important for the purpose of personalization or accessibility but also for being able to adapt to the many different contexts in which a Web application may be used and to the varying types of devices (such as mobile devices) used to access the application in multi-channel deployments. Such new needs demand for the development of adaptive Web systems, able to support more effective and efficient content delivery, services and interactions in all those situations.

Furthermore, Web applications are evolutionary in their nature. They frequently require changes on content, functionality, semantics, structure, navigation, presentation or implementation. Web applications as a whole, and their services and content are thus typically highly volatile and evolve over time. Reasons for evolution include:

• Supporting new requirements (e.g., deriving from new knowledge, practices, processes, management approaches, or technologies);
• Maintaining an application's hyperlink/navigation structure (e.g., repairing incorrect linking and connecting unreachable pages);
• Guaranteeing consistency with changing external sources (e.g., a referenced ontology or externally linked contents, whose change may have an impact on the validity of the Web site);
• Updating/changing (by the user) content, structure, navigation, presentation (e.g. relevant with the rise of blogs, wiki's, etc.);
• Integrating new or alternative (sub-)systems.

Properly dealing with evolution clearly influences the quality of a Web system. Provisions to automatically deal with evolution and its consequences will become indispensable especially in large-scale Web applications, where manual management of changes and their impact is infeasible.

Although highly relevant due to the intrinsic nature of Web applications, the problem of dealing with adaptation and evolution of Web applications (both during requirements analysis, design, implementation and deployment) and its impact is highly under-estimated. The ultimate goal of AEWSE is therefore to facilitate the discussion of key issues, approaches, open problems, innovative applications, and trends in these research areas, for identifying methodologies and technologies to support adaptive access to and/or evolution in (the design of) Web applications.