Guest editorial: soft computing on the web

Abstract

This special issue encompasses nine papers devoted to the recent developments in the field of the Soft Computing tools applied on the Web. The issue originated from presentations at the special session ‘‘Preference Modelling on the Web’’ organized by the guest editors at the ‘‘8th International FLINS Conference on Computational Intelligence in Decision and Control’’ that was held in Madrid, Spain, 21–24th September 2008. Each paper for the special issue was revised by at least two referees and finally nine papers were accepted according to the referees’ evaluations. The submissions include two papers about the development of information filtering systems or recommender systems based on soft computing tools. The first paper by De Campos, Fernandez-Luna, Huete and Rueda-Morales, ‘‘Using second-hand information in collaborative recommender systems’’, proposes a novel collaborative recommender system that uses quality second-hand information to develop the recommendation process when no collaborative information is available. In the paper ‘‘A flexible multi criteria information filtering model’’, Bordogna and Pasi present a flexible multicriteria information filtering system that allows choosing several distinct criteria, such as content aboutness, coverage, novelty, trust, timeliness, and combining them by a soft aggregation to define a personalized filter in such a way that different personalization levels are possible. On the other hand, two other papers are related to the discovery of web services. Fenza and Senatore define a system for supporting the user in the discovery of semantic web services, taking into account personal requirements and preference in their study entitled ‘‘Friendly web services selection exploiting fuzzy formal concept analysis’’. This approach exploits the fuzzy formal concept analysis for modeling concepts and relative relationships elicited from web resources. In the paper titled ‘‘An extension of a fuzzy reputation agent trust model (AFRAS) in the ART testbed’’, Carbo and Molina-Lopez analyze the performance of an extension of the fuzzy reputation agent trust model (AFRAS) for inferring reability of web services applied in the ART (Agent Reputation and Trust) testbed, showing its advantages and drawbacks. One contribution of this special issue is related to the development of Web based systems. In the paper titled ‘‘Soft computing and web intelligence for supporting consensus reaching’’, Kacpzryk and Zadrozny introduce a new web-based architecture of a group decision support system for reaching consensus in a group of individuals (agents) based on fuzzy logic. In order to support the consensus reaching process, the authors propose to apply modern web technologies that allow to combine humanconsistency of the assumed representation of the decision problem, intelligent and knowledge-based support for the information search and decision process monitoring and guidance with the user-friendliness and intuitiveness of the user interface, typical for web-based implementations. In this special issue we give a special attention to the use of the soft computing tools to solve the problem of the information access and information retrieval on the web. Four papers about that topic are included in this issue. In the first one titled ‘‘A new fusion strategy for web metasearch’’, Martin-Bautista, Sachez, Vila and Delgado present a new rank-based fusion strategy and a score-based fusion strategy with fuzzy scores to solve the collection fusion problem on the web. As novelty, they use RL-preference relations to represent and work with the information, and as a basis for A. G. Lopez-Herrera E. Herrera-Viedma (&) Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain e-mail: viedma@decsai.ugr.es