Lecture Notes in Computer Science

The Third International Conference on E-commerce and Web Technology (EC-Web 2002) was held in conjunction with the DEXA 02 in Aix-en-Provence, France. This conference, first held in Greenwich, United Kingdom in 2000, is now in its third year and is very well established. As in the two previous years, it served as a forum bringing together researchers from academia and commercial developers from industry to discuss the current state of the art in E-commerce and web technology. Inspirations and new ideas emerged from intensive discussions during formal sessions and social events. Keynote addresses, research presentations, and discussions during the conference helped to further develop the exchange of ideas among the researchers, developers, and practitioners who attended. The conference attracted more than 100 submissions and each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members. The program committee selected 40 papers for presentation and publication, a task which was not easy due to the high quality of the submitted papers. We would like to express our thanks to our colleagues who helped to put together the technical program: the program committee members and external reviewers for their timely and rigorous reviews of the papers, and the organizing committee for their help in the administrative work and support. We owe special thanks to Gabriela Wagner and Maria Schweikert for always being available when their helping hand was needed.