Special issue on the 15th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems (MEDES 2023) and the 27th International Database Engineered Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2023)

World Wide Web (2025) 28:6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-024-01321-z EDITORIAL Special issue on the 15th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems (MEDES 2023) and the 27th International Database Engineered Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2023) Joe Tekli1 · Djamal Benslimane2 · Richard Chbeir3 · Yannis Manolopoulos4 · Ngoc‑Thanh Nguyen5 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024 The special issue was preceded by the 15th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems (MEDES’2023) and the 27th International Database Engineering Applications Symposium (IDEAS’2023), jointly organized in Heraklion, Greece, on May 5–7 2023. Eight manuscripts selected from both conferences and were invited for possible inclusion into the present special issues of the WWW journal, after a rigorous peer-review according to the journal’s high standards. Among the eight manuscripts, only five ones made it through the review process, corresponding to a 62.5% acceptance rate. These five accepted articles that comprise this special issue revolve around solutions for data storage, knowledge management, security, and online services, to support the establishment of digital ecosystems and manage their resources. The Web has known a fast progression: going from the Web 1.0, known as Web of Documents where users are simply consumers of static information, to the more active Web 2.0, known as social or collaborative Web where users produce and consume information * Joe Tekli ; Djamal Benslimane Richard Chbeir Yannis Manolopoulos Ngoc‑Thanh Nguyen 1 Lebanese American University, Byblos Campus, 36, Byblos, Lebanon 2 Lyon 1 University, LIRIS Laboratory, 69 622 Villeurbanne, France 3 Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (UPPA), 64600 Anglet, France 4 University of Nicosia, 2417 Nicosia, Cyprus 5 Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, 50‑370 Wroclaw, Poland Vol.:(0123456789) 6 Page 2 of 4 World Wide Web (2025) 28:6 simultaneously, and entering the more sophisticated Web 3.0, known as the Semantic Web by augmenting information with well-defined meaning so that it becomes more easily accessible by human users and automated processes. Fostering service intelligence and atomicity, i.e., the ability of autonomous services to interact automatically, promotes the dawn of a new era: the Web 4.0, better known as the Internet of Things (IoT), an extension of the Semantic Web where (physical/software) objects and services autonomously interact in a multimedia virtual environment, provided with embedded communication capabilities, common semantics and addressing schemes. IoT promotes the concept of digital ecosystems where connected environments of (human and software) agents collaborate, interact, compete, and evolve autonomously to solve complex and dynamic problems. These digital ecosystems can exhibit new self-* properties (such as self-management, self-healing and self-configuration) environments, thanks to the re-combination and evolution of its “digital components”, in which resources provided by each entity are properly conserved, managed and used. They can also exhibit high levels of heterogeneity as different terminals (in terms of functionality and technology) are expected to connect and interact in the same communication environment. The problem of semantic interoperability is far more acute in such dynamic environments, due to the lack of predefined relationships between the service requestors and the service providers. Service requestors/providers on the Web are generally dynamic, operating on the “publish-find-bind” paradigm principle, where services are dynamically added and described (published) in a service registry. The service descriptions are then used to search (find) and associate (bind) the service to the service requestor. Hence, there is a need on the Web to handle and synchronize information concerning the collective of intelligent agents interacting in a collaborative environment. Adding to the issues of semantic interoperability, it is common for Web users to contribute their multimedia data and knowledge to the community, allowing the editing and manipulation of such public knowledge in a collaborative environment (e.g., tweets, blogs, Google + , etc.). As a result, the Web is becoming more than a distributed cloud container of (raw and/or semantic) multimedia data, but is increasingly harnessing collective knowledge. Collective knowledge is the development of knowledge assets or (semantic) information resources from a distributed pool of contributions. It is viewed as the combination of all known multimedia data, information, and meta-data concerning a given (set of) concept(s), fact(s), user(s), or processes (s), as well as the semantic links between them. Hence, Web agents are expected to automatically analyze and handle large collections of multimedia data with their contents, links and transactions, using the sum of their respective intelligence and knowledge, producing new knowledge (new ontologies, new semantic annotations, new inference rules, etc.) to improve information management (indexing, storage, search, and retrieval). To sum up, the extension of the Web toward the vision of digital ecosystems, where machines and software agents meaningfully and intelligently manipulate and exchange information and services without human interaction, remains at its early stages; as it faces many technological challenges, ranging over: always-on connectivity (requiring universal identification techniques as well as open network infrastructures), semantic interoperability (requiring comprehensive semantic references and mediation gateways between heterogeneous terminals/agents), collective knowledge management (to improve data storage, indexing, and retrieval in a distributed and heterogeneous environment), leading to autonomous data/services sustainability and evolution (fostering the processing capabilities of terminals/agents on Web to produce and manipulate semantic knowledge in solving problems). In this context, the application of Information Technologies has the potential to World Wide Web (2025) 28:6 Page 3 of 4 6 enable the understanding of how agents request resources and ultimately interact to create benefits and added-values, impacting business practices and knowledge. Given the above historical context, in this editorial, we elaborate and annotate on some key papers that have been published recently in World Wide Web journal special issue on MEDES-IDEAS 2023 conferences. These papers focus on novel techniques, models, and methodologies for data storage, knowledge management, security, and online services, to support the establishment of digital ecosystems and manage their resources. A survey paper by Akif Quddus Khan, Mihhail Matskin, Radu Prodan, Christoph Bussler, Dumitru Roman, and Ahmet Soylu provides a detailed taxonomy of cloud storage c (...truncated)