The book aims to investigate current developments and new insights into methods,techniques and technologies for intelligent information access from a multidisciplinary perspective. It comprises six chapters authored by participants in the research event Intelligent Information Access, held in Cagliari (Italy) in December 2008.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the nth International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web) held in Bilbao, Spain, in September 2010.

The 22 papers accepted for EC-Web, selected from 45 submissions, are organized in topical sessions on recommender systems; e-payment, security and trust; service-oriented e-commerce and business processes; and agent-based e-commerce . The volume is completed by short summaries of the two invited talks on web advertising and electronic markets.

This book is a showcase of recent advances in knowledge discovery enhanced with semantic and social information. It includes eight contributed chapters that grew out of two joint workshops at ECML/PKDD 2007.There is general agreement that the effectiveness of Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery output strongly depends not only on the quality of source data and the sophistication of learning algorithms, but also on additional input provided by domain experts. There is less agreement on whether, when and how such input can and should be formalized as explicit prior knowledge.The six chapters in the first part of the book aim to investigate this aspect by addressing four different topics: inductive logic programming; the role of human users; investigations of fully automated methods for integrating background knowledge; the use of background knowledge for Web mining. The two chapters in the second part are motivated by the Web 2.0 (r)evolution and the increasingly strong role of user-generated content. The contributions emphasize the vision of the Web as a social medium for content and knowledge sharing.