This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th Asia-Pacific Web Conference, APWeb 2003, held in Xian, China in April 2003.

The 39 revised full papers and 16 short papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 136 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML and database design; efficient XML data management; XML transformation; Web mining; Web clustering, ranking, and profiling; payment and security; Web application architectures; advanced applications; Web multimedia; network protocols; workflow management systems; advanced search; and data allocation and replication.