Michael Adeyeye

The 5th International Conference on WEB Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST) was held in Lisboa, Portugal on March 23-26, 2009. It was a great experience. The trip to Portugal from Cape Town was hectic. First, I missed my flight to Lisboa, Portugal from Paris, France. I had to wait about 5hrs to take the next flight. Second, I could not get my luggage when I arrived Lisboa, Portugal. I had thought that my luggage would have arrived Lisboa before I would arrive. The reason was that I had asked that I would like to pick up my luggage in Lisboa, Portugal, and I had already missed my flight, so I had thought my luggage must have been sent ahead.

The conference was well attended though. Quite a number of participants showed interest in my work. Lest I forget, I happened to be the only one from an African University (University of Cape Town). Participants, however, came from around the globe, and there were not only postgraduate students, but also professionals from various fields. My paper was titled “A SIP-based Web Session Migration Service,” and the only work that I found related to my work was “SHIP-SIP HTTP Interaction Protocol.” However, there were a number of interesting work/papers, such as “Rich Presence Authorization Using Secure Web Services,” “Towards Service Orientation on Resource Constrained Devices” and “JWIG – Yet Another Framework for Maintainable and Secure Web Applications.” Surprisingly, the doctoral consortium, which was meant for Ph.D students to present their work to a doctoral body, did not take place. I had my paper submitted to the doctoral consortium accepted, but I could not register the paper on time. I learnt that it was an idea that they (the conference organizers) gave a shot but not so many PG students responded; so, it went belly up.

I realized when I got to Johannesburg, South Africa that I left behind my laptop adapter and my towel in the hotel I stayed, where the conference took place. I am yet to get another adapter, and I am currently furious, owing to my carelessness. However, it was a great fun. Couple of things I did were sight-seeing to El Corte Ingles, Sebastio; Nokia Customer Care, Areeiro, City Centre (where I had a rich dinner with some friends, and the performance in Portuguese in the restaurant we went to was also great) and many more. I made a lot of friends, attendees who had come from Japan, Spain, USA, China, Austria, France, Russia and so on. Lest I forget, the conference was held in conjunction with the 1st International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2009). Although the WEBIST conference focused on Web Technologies and the event was well-planned, I am not sure if I would want to keep attending the conference. I could only see few papers/work related to my work. I look forward to one of the premier IEEE conferences on Wireless Communication called IEEE WCNC, which will take place in Budapest, Hungary on April 5-8, 2009.