This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Distributed Communities on the Web, DCW 2002, held in Sydney, Australia in April 2002.The 25 revised full papers presented together with an introductory overview and outline of the field were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaptive networks, collaborative systems, languages for the Web, and adaptive distributed systems.

Open Problems in Distributed Communities.- Position Papers.- "The Medium" Is the Message.- A Middleware Architecture for Personalized Communities of Devices.- A General Purpose Model for Presence Awareness.- SecAdvise: A Security Mechanism Advisor.- Adaptive Networks.- Research on Reliable Communication in Real-Time Collaborative Designing Systems.- Efficient Connection Management for Web Applications.- QoS Performance Improvement for Web Applications.- An Efficient Algorithm for Application-Layer Anycasting.- Experimenting with Gnutella Communities.- Collaborative Systems.- The SmartPhone: Interactive Group Audio with Complementary Symbolic Control.- PIÑAS: Supporting a Community of Co-authors on the Web.- A Group-Based Time-Stamping Scheme for the Preservation of Group Intentions.- A User-Centred Consistency Model in Real-Time Collaborative Editing Systems.- Multi Agent Transactional Negotiation: Application to E-marketing.- A Rule-Driven Approach for Defining the Behaviour of Negotiating Software Agents.- Distributed Transaction Management in a Peer-to-Peer Process-Oriented Environment.- Languages for the Web.- Using XML Schemas to Create and Encode Interactive 3-D Audio Scenes for Multimedia and Virtual Reality Applications.- The Design of High-Level Database Access Method in a Web-Based 3D Object Authoring Tool.- Language Standardization for the Semantic Web: The Long Way from OIL to OWL.- Noema: A Metalanguage for Scripting Versionable Hypertexts.- Adaptive Distributed Systems.- Sharing Social Recommendations: Towards a Social Portal.- Enabling Technologies for Communities at Web Shops.- Modelling Service-Providing Location-Based E-communities and the Impact of User Mobility.- Client Migration in a Continuous Data Network.- Using Jini to Integrate HomeAutomation in a Distributed Software-System.