Internet Programming: Tools and Applications -- A Unified Algorithm for Cache Replacement and Consistency in Web Proxy Servers -- Transactional Services for the Internet -- On the Unification of Persistent Programming and the World-Wide Web -- Integration and Access to Web Data -- Interactive Query and Search in Semistructured Databases -- Bringing Database Functionality to the WWW -- Fixpoint Calculus for Querying Semistructured Data -- Hypertext Views on Databases -- Incremental Maintenance of Hypertext Views -- Using YAT to Build a Web Server -- Languages and Tools to Specify Hypertext Views on Databases -- Searching and Mining the Web -- WebSuite—A Tool Suite for Harnessing Web Data -- Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web -- WUM: A Tool for Web Utilization Analysis -- Finding Near-Replicas of Documents on the Web.

This volume is based on the contributions to the International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB’98), held in Valencia, Spain, March 27 and 28, 1998, in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT’98). In response to the workshop call for papers, 37 manuscripts were submitted to the program committee. The review process was conducted entirely by- mail. While the quality of submissions was generally high, only 16 papers could be accepted for presentation within the limited time allowed by the workshop schedule. Authors of workshop papers were invited to submit extended versions oftheirpapersforpublicationinthesepost-workshopproceedings.The13papers appearing in this volume were submitted and selected after a second round of reviews. We would like to thank the program committee of WebDB’98, all those who submitted their work, all additional reviewers, and the conference o?cials of EBDT’98 for their invaluable support. Special thanks go to Paolo Merialdo, who actively participated in the organization of the workshop.