The World Wide Web And Databases

Mining the World Wide Web: An Information Search Approach explores the concepts and techniques of Web mining, a promising and rapidly growing field of computer science research. Web mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing on such areas as artificial intelligence, databases, data mining, data warehousing, data visualization, information retrieval, machine learning, markup languages, pattern recognition, statistics, and Web technology. Mining the World Wide Web presents the Web mining material from an information search perspective, focusing on issues relating to the efficiency, feasibility, scalability and usability of searching techniques for Web mining. Mining the World Wide Web is designed for researchers and developers of Web information systems and also serves as an excellent supplemental reference to advanced level courses in data mining, databases and information retrieval.

This volume is based on the contributions to the International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB’98), held in Valencia, Spain, March 27 and 28, 1998, in conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT’98). In response to the workshop call for papers, 37 manuscripts were submitted to the program committee. The review process was conducted entirely by- mail. While the quality of submissions was generally high, only 16 papers could be accepted for presentation within the limited time allowed by the workshop schedule. Authors of workshop papers were invited to submit extended versions oftheirpapersforpublicationinthesepost-workshopproceedings.The13papers appearing in this volume were submitted and selected after a second round of reviews. We would like to thank the program committee of WebDB’98, all those who submitted their work, all additional reviewers, and the conference o?cials of EBDT’98 for their invaluable support. Special thanks go to Paolo Merialdo, who actively participated in the organization of the workshop.

With the development of the World-Wide Web, data management problems have branched out from the traditional framework in which tabular data is processed under the strict control of an application, and address today the rich variety of information that is found on the Web, considering a variety of ?exible envir- ments under which such data can be searched, classi ed , and processed. Da- base systems are coming forward today in a new role as the primary backend for the information provided on the Web. Most of today’s Web accesses trigger some form of content generation from a database, while electronic commerce often triggers intensive DBMS-based applications. The research community has begun to revise data models, query languages, data integration techniques, - dexes, query processing algorithms, and transaction concepts in order to cope with the characteristics and scale of the data on the Web. New problems have been identi ed , among them goal-oriented information gathering, management of semi-structured data, or database-style query languages for Web data, to name just a few. The International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB) is a series of workshops intended to bring together researchers interested in the interaction between databases and the Web. This year’s WebDB 2000 was the third in the series, and was held in Dallas, Texas, in conjunction with the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data.

J.-E. Dubois and N. Gershon This book was inspired by the Symposium on "Communications and Computer Aided Systems" held at the 14th International CODATA Conference in September 1994 in Chambery, France. It was conceived and influenced by the discussions at the symposium and most of the contributions were written following the Conference. This is the first comprehensive book, published in one volume, of issues concerning the challenges and the vital impact of the information revolution (including the Internet and the World Wide Web) on science and technology. Topics concerning the impact of the information revolution on science and technology include: • Dramatic improvement in sharing of data and information among scientists and engineers around the world • Collaborations (on-line and off-line) of scientists and engineers separated by distance . • Availability of visual tools and methods to view, understand, search, and share information contained in data • Improvements in data and information browsing, search and access and • New ways of publishing scientific and technological data and information. These changes have dramatically modified the way research and development in science and technology are being carried out. However, to facilitate this information flow nationally and internationally, the science and technology communities need to develop and put in place new standards and policies and resolve some legal issues.