Foreword Web2Touch: Living Experience Through the Web

The Web2Touch workshops were started in 2007 with the intent to connect researchers from different domains who share a multidisciplinary view of the web and to demonstrate the full potential of the web as a live medium for sharing and collaboration. By joining their complimentary views, researchers have demonstrated that it is now possible to exchange different concepts for designing solutions based on similar problems spread over various disciplines such as life sciences, grid and interoperable computations or education. Consequently, the contributions we have seen during the last 4 years have shown how it is now possible, via intelligent and cooperative use of the web, to solve problems involving technical, semantic and organizational aspects. While we have reviewed papers addressing a wide range of technical topics, the papers we have selected for this introductory issue represent the state of the art and will present new works concerning semantic web technologies, a novel collaborative web browsing proposal, and an approach relying on intentional process modeling and semantic web technologies and models. In general the Web2Touch workshop's goal was to examine how technologies like web services and knowledge engineering, to mention just a few, can improve the usability of the web for non-experienced users. Several papers have shown practical use cases in various domains, with a prevalence in the areas of medicine, biology, and education, which are probably due to the sensibility of people involved in these areas and their increasing need for collaborative technology. From these 18 papers, we narrowed our selection to the following three papers. The paper " A Reference Ontology Based Approach for Service Oriented Semantic Interoperability " considers ontologies and how they are becoming more and more popular and usable. This paper demonstrated how one could establish effective information exchange among applications in a distributed environment, having participants not only sharing their functions,