The Asia-Pacific region has emerged in recent years as one of the fastest g- wing regions in the world in the use of Web technologies as well as in making significant contributions to WWW research and development. Since the first Asia-Pacific Web conference in 1998, APWeb has continued to provide a forum for researchers, professionals, and industrial practitioners from around the world to share their rapidly evolving knowledge and to report new advances in WWW technologies and applications. APWeb 2004 received an overwhelming 386 full-paper submissions, including 375 research papers and 11 industrial papers from 20 countries and regions: A- tralia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, USA, and Vietnam. Each submission was carefully reviewed by three members of the p- gram committee. Among the 386 submitted papers, 60 regular papers, 24 short papers, 15 poster papers, and 3 industrial papers were selected to be included in the proceedings. The selected papers cover a wide range of topics including Web services, Web intelligence, Web personalization, Web query processing, Web - ching, Web mining, text mining, data mining and knowledge discovery, XML database and query processing, workflow management, E-commerce, data - rehousing, P2P systems and applications, Grid computing, and networking. The paper entitled “Towards Adaptive Probabilistic Search in Unstructured P2P - stems”, co-authored by Linhao Xu, Chenyun Dai, Wenyuan Cai, Shuigeng Zhou, and Aoying Zhou, was awarded the best APWeb 2004 student paper.
