This book contains a selection of the best papers from WEBIST 2008 (the Fourth International
Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies) held in Funchal Madeira in 2008
organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information Control and
Communication (INSTICC) and co-sponsored by the Wo- flow Management Coalition (WfMC). The
purpose of the WEBIST series of conferences is to bring together researchers engineers and
practitioners interested in the technological advances and business - plications of web-based
information systems. The series focuses on four main topic areas covering different aspects of
web information systems including internet te- nology web interfaces and applications
society e-business and e-government and e-learning. WEBIST 2008 received 238 paper
submissions from more than 40 countries on all continents. A double-blind review process was
enforced with the help of more than 200 experts from the international Program Committee each
of them specialized in one of the main conference topic areas. After reviewing 32 papers were
selected to be published and presented as full papers and 64 additional papers describing
work-- progress as short papers for oral presentation only. Furthermore 58 papers were p-
sented as posters. The full-paper acceptance ratio was 13% and the total oral paper acceptance
ratio was 40%. Therefore we hope that you find the papers included in this book interesting
and we trust they may represent a helpful reference in the future for all those who need to
address any of the research areas mentioned above.
