This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Innovative Internet Community Systems, IICS 2004, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in June 2004. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers have been carefully reviewed. They focus mainly on system-oriented problems, text processing, and theoretical foundations of distributed and Internet systems. They also deal with speed and quality-of-service problems of Internet protocols, aspects of cooperation and collaboration in Internet systems, as well as agent and text-processing-based methods. In addition, 9 papers stem from two mini-workshops, one on computational epidemiology and the other on optimization of urban traffic systems.

Thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Innovative Internet Community Systems, IICS 2005, held in Paris, France, in June 2005. The 17 revised full papers presented have been carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. They mainly address system-oriented problems, content and text processing, and theoretical foundations of quality-of-service problems of Internet protocols, aspects of cooperation and collaboration in Internet systems, as well as agent and text-processing-based methods.

The papers in this volume were presented at the workshop “Innovative Internet Community Systems 2003” held on June 19–21, 2003 in Leipzig. IICS 2003 was the thirdworkshopintheIICSseries.Thepurposeofthese workshopsisto bring together researchers in the area of system and information management for the Next Generation Internet (NGI). Like the preceding two workshops, IICS 2001 and IICS 2002, this year’s workshop was organized by the Gesellschaft fur ̈ Informatik (GI) in Germany to support the exchange of experiences, results and technology in the area of focus. The 21 papers (2 invited, 19 other contributions) presented at the conference and in the present volume were selected from more than 30 submissions. Every submission was fully reviewed by 3 members of the program committee. We wish to thank all those who made the meeting possible: the authors for submitting papers, the members of the program committee for their excellent work, and the two invited speakers. We wish to express our sincere apprec- tion to Regine Gabler (University of Leipzig) and Barbara Hamann (Technical University, Ilmenau) for their great e?orts and perfect work concerning the - ministrative details associated with the workshop and the preparation of this volume. Finally, we wish to acknowledge the substantial help provided by our sponsors: the University of Leipzig, the Technical University, Ilmenau, and the TKK (Techniker Krankenkasse) Leipzig. August 2003 Thomas B ̈ ohme Gerhard Heyer Herwig Unger VI Organization Organization IICS 2003 was organized by the Gesellschaft fur ̈ Informatik (GI) in Germany.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Third International Workshop on Innovative Internet Community Systems, IICS 2003, held in Leipzig, Germany in June 2003. The 19 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers have gone through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and were selected from more than 30 submissions. Among the topics addressed are semantic search, network communities, e-learning, message-oriented middleware, networked information spaces, mobile business processes, distributed communication systems, distributed Web applications, semantic Web environments, file-sharing systems, network intrusion detection, protocols, self-organizing networks, XML, and linguistic knowledge services.

Today, "community" seems to be everywhere. At home, at work, and online, the vague but comforting idea of the community pervades every area of life. But have we lost the ability truly to understand what it means? The Neighborhood in the Internet investigates social and civic effects of community networks on local community, and how community network designs are appropriated and extended by community members. Carroll uses his conceptual model of "community" to re-examine the Blacksburg Electronic Village – the first Web-based community network – applying it to attempts to sustain and enrich contemporary communities through information technology. The book provides an analysis of the role of community in contemporary paradigms for work and other activity mediated by the Internet. It brings to the fore a series of design experiments investigating new approaches to community networking and addresses the future trajectory and importance of community networks. This book will be of interest to students of sociology, community psychology, human-computer interaction, information science, and computer-supported collaborative work.