A distillation and systematic organization of the authors’ work on web information systems (WIS), this book indicates that WIS design must be considered in the context of a whole web database, including semantic aspects, and not just as a collection of web pages. This orientation leads to a strong emphasis on conceptual and semantic aspects.

The book is divided into several parts, from semantic scenario definitions and software development aspects to conceptual modeling, WIS characteristics, modeling and design aspects, database codesign, system development, and WIS engineering. The coverage of these topics is comprehensive, with many details, numerous examples, and a long bibliography (948 entries).

A precise description of web scenarios encouraged the authors to develop their own notation, which is fine for describing semantic scenarios but not appropriate for database interactions. For that, the authors use an extended version of entity-relationship (ER) models, although the unified modeling language (UML) is a better and more complete model to describe these interactions because of its dynamic aspects.

A more serious issue is the lack of consideration for security and privacy as part of their semantic models. The book considers security as a low-level aspect. There is only a discussion of using views to enforce security as it is done in relational databases. But if security constraints are not defined at a higher abstraction level, there is no guidance about which rights should be given in views. However, these deficiencies do not reduce the research value of this book. Given the poor quality of most websites, the authors’ emphasis on systematic semantic-oriented website definition is very important; web designers would do well to study these methods. The approach is rigorous and appropriate for a graduate course on WIS.