Abstract: The World Wide Web is a vast source of information accessible to computers, but understandable only to humans. The goal of the research described here is to automatically create a computer understandable world wide knowledge base whose content mirrors that of the World Wide Web. Such a knowledge base would enable much more effective retrieval of Web information, and promote new uses of the Web to support knowledge-based inference and problem solving. Our approach is to develop a trainable information extraction system that takes two inputs: an ontology defining the classes and relations of interest, and a set of training data consisting of labeled regions of hypertext representing instances of these classes and relations. Given these inputs, the system learns to extract information from other pages and hyperlinks on the Web. This paper describes our general approach, several machine learning algorithms for this task, and promising initial results with a prototype system.

Abstract: This article describes a novel way of combining data mining techniques on Internet data in order to discover actionable marketing intelligence in electronic commerce scenarios. The data that is considered not only covers various types of server and web meta information, but also marketing data and knowledge. Furthermore, heterogeneity resolution thereof and Internet- and electronic commerce-specific pre-processing activities are embedded. A generic web log data hypercube is formally defined and schematic designs for analytical and predictive activities are given. From these materialised views, various online analytical web usage data mining techniques are shown, which include marketing expertise as domain knowledge and are specifically designed for electronic commerce purposes.

Abstract: This paper provides a short review and a state of the art report on Webbased adaptive educational systems. The systems are analyzed according to applied adaptation technologies.

Abstract: The Web is based on a browsing paradigm that makes it difficult to retrieve and integrate data from multiple sites. Today, the only way to do this is to build specialized applications, which are time-consuming to develop and difficult to maintain. We are addressing this problem by creating the technology and tools for rapidly constructing information agents that extract, query, and integrate data from web sources. Our approach is based on a simple, uniform representation that makes it efficient to integrate multiple sources. Instead of building specialized algorithms for handling web sources, we have developed methods for mapping web sources into this uniform representation. This approach builds on work from knowledge representation, machine learning and automated planning. The resulting system, called Ariadne, makes it fast and cheap to build new information agents that access existing web sources. Ariadne also makes it easy to maintain these agents and incorporate new sources as they become available.

Abstract: Several visualizations have emerged which attempt to visualize all or part of the World Wide Web. Those visualizations, however, fail to present the dynamically changing ecology of users and documents on the Web. We present new techniques for Web Ecology and Evolution Visualization (WEEV). Disk Trees represent a discrete time slice of the Web ecology. A collection of Disk Trees forms a Time Tube, representing the evolution of the Web over longer periods of time. These visualizations are intended to aid authors and webmasters with the production and organization of content, assist Web surfers making sense of information, and help researchers understand the Web.

Abstract: There are two main objectives of the paper. First, in a systematic and statistically rigorous manner, we attempt to descriptively document the types and nature of marketing information on commercial home‐pages, with a view to identifying the major objectives of contemporary commercial Web sites that pre‐dominate the Web. Using Resnik and Stern’s “information content” paradigm, we evaluate the informativeness of commercial home pages. Second, we attempt to empirically examine various important factors of commercial home‐pages that lead to increased visits, or hit‐rates. The identification of hit‐rate determinants is likely to be of great value, both to Web page designers and to the many small and large firms seeking to establish their presence on the Web.

Abstract: We propose a new approach to programming Web applications that increases the Web's computational power, the Web's flexibility, and Web programmer productivity. Whereas Web servers have traditionally been responsible for producing all content, intermediaries now provide new places for producing and manipulating Web data. We define intermediaries as computational elements that lie along the path of a Web transaction. In this paper, we describe the fundamental ideas behind intermediaries and provide a collection of example applications. We also describe WBI, an implemented architecture for building intermediaries that we have used to construct many applications, including personal histories, password management, image distillation, collaborative filtering, targeted advertising, and Web advising.

Abstract: The World Wide Web currently has a huge amount of data, with practically no classification information, and this makes it extremely difficult to handle effectively. It has been realized recently that the only feasible way to radically improve the situation is to add to Web objects a metadata classification, to help search engines and Web-based digital libraries to properly classify and structure the information present in the WWW. However, having a few standard metadata sets is insufficient in order to have a fully classified World Wide Web. The first major problem is that it will take some time before a reasonable number of people start using metadata to provide a better Web classification. The second major problem is that no one can guarantee that a majority of the Web objects will be ever properly classified via metadata. In this paper, we address the problem of how to cope with such intrinsic limits of Web metadata, proposing a method that is able to partially solve the above two problems, and showing concrete evidence of its effectiveness. In addition, we examine the important problem of what is the required “critical mass” in the World Wide Web for metadata in order for it to be really useful.

Abstract: The World Wide Web (WWW) is currently one of the most important electronic information sources. However, its query interfaces and the provided reasoning services are rather limited. Ontobroker consists of a number of languages and tools that enhance query access and inference service in the WWW. It provides languages to annotate web documents with ontological information, to represent ontologies, and to formulate queries. The tool set of Ontobroker allows us to access information and knowledge from the web and to infer new knowledge with an inference engine based on techniques from logic programming. This article provides several examples that illustrate these languages and tools and the kind of service that is provided. We also discuss the bottlenecks of our approach that stem from the fact that the applicability of Ontobroker requires two time-consuming activities: (1) developing shared ontologies that reflect the consensus of a group of web users and (2) annotating web documents with additional information.

Abstract: As a continuation of previous study this paper reports on a series of studies into business use of the World Wide Web and, more generally the Internet. The use of the World Wide Web as a business tool has increased rapidly for the past three years, and the benefits of the World Wide Web to business and customers are discussed, together with the barriers that hold back future development of electronic commerce. As with the previous study, we report on a desk survey of 300 randomly selected business web sites and on the results of an electronic mail questionnaire sent to the sample companies.

Abstract: The World Wide Web (WWW) is a tool that can beused in many ways for basic statistics education. Using the latest WWW technology, educators can nowinclude interactive demonstrations in the form of J...

Abstract: This paper discusses the role of the Word Wide Web as communication tool for industrial marketers and its position in the business-to-business promotional mix Using the well-known industrial marketing concepts of purchasing decision processes and hierarchy of effects models, it introduces a conceptual framework for measuring the efficiency of a Web site Examples are given of both large and small industrial marketers who are currently using their Web sites to achieve these effects Efficiency indexes are defined for five Web communication activities and an overall measure of Web site efficiency measure is presented

Abstract: As once-proprietary mission-specific information systems migrate onto the Web, traditional security analysis cannot sufficiently protect each subsystem atomically. The Web encourages open. decentralized systems that span multiple administrative domains. Trust Management is an emerging framework for decentralizing security decisions that helps developers and others in asking “why” trust is granted rather than immediately focusing on “how” cryptography can enforce it. In this poster, we summarize the implications of Trust Management to future Web applications.

Abstract: This paper examines the distinctives of relationship marketing, provides a simple taxonomy of the world wide web, and proposes that there is a high level of synergy between the inherent functionality and interactivity provided by the world wide web and the implementation of a relationship marketing perspective. This proposition is tested using data from a national survey of New Zealand organizations known to maintain and operate a web site, and the relationship is found to be significant. It is concluded that the inherent nature of emerging Internet technologies is supportive of the higher levels of customer interaction implicit in relationship marketing.

Abstract: From the Publisher: Through an approach that is both conceptual and practical, this text helps mass communication and broadcast students understand the value and commercial uses of the World Wide Web in the mass communication professions. Students will learn to think critically about social, legal, and ethical issues related to the world wide Web, and they will get practical information about how different media domains (radio, TV, public relations, advertising) are currently using the Web for both marketing and content purposes.

Abstract: This paper describes the efforts at KTH in creating educational tools for speech technology. The demand for such tools is increasing with the advent of speech as a medium for man– machine communication. The world wide web was chosen as our platform in order to increase the usability and accessibility of our computer exercises. The aim was to provide dedicated educational software instead of exercises based on complex research tools. Currently, the set of exercises comprises basic speech analysis, multi-modal speech synthesis and spoken dialogue systems. Students access web pages in which the exercises have been embedded as applets. This makes it possible to use them in a classroom setting, as well as from the students’ home computers.

Abstract: The traditional approach to document categorization is categorization by content, since information for categorizing a document is extracted from the document itself. In a hypertext environment like the Web, the structure of documents and the link topology can be exploited to perform what we call categorization by context [Attardi 98]: the context surrounding a link in an HTML document is used for categorizing the document referred by the link. Categorization by context is capable of dealing also with multimedia material, since it does not rely on the ability to analyze the content of documents. Categorization by context leverages on the categorization activity implicitly performed when someone places or refers to a document on the Web. By focusing the analysis to the documents used by a group of people, one can build a catalogue tuned to the need of that group. Categorization by context is based on the following assumptions:

Abstract: The potential benefits of the World Wide Web (Web) in teaching college courses in psychology stem from the wealth of information available to instructors and students, the ease of access to that information, and the hypermedia richness of Web documents. In this article, I describe the introduction of the Web into an advanced course in social psychology using activities that entailed collaboration and knowledge sharing, direct experience with information in various formats, and manipulation of information into new forms. The activities included Web Assignments associated with assigned readings, a Social Psychology and Humor project, a Social Psychology in the News project, and the development of a Web Tutorial on a social psychological topic. I discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of using the Web in this context.

Abstract: Editor—In their note, “Piloting patient attitudinal surveys on the web” Suchard et al rightly point out that the web is a powerful resource to use in developing surveys quickly and effectively.1 But the power of the web goes far beyond that. Psychologists and sociologists are already using the web for surveys,2 and there has also been a recent experiment to collect health status information for medical outcomes research with a web based questionnaire.3 The web …

Abstract: The lifecycle of Web applications covers the design, implementation, and maintenance of the services. First generation Web development tools just concentrated on the creation of single pages. Later Web engineering tools have been integrating the management of complete Web sites and the navigation model. But only few attempt to cover all the aspects of the lifecycle, and especially the maintenance task which is essential on a dynamic medium as is the case on the Web. To increase the manageability and introduce flexibility to large Web services we introduce the JESSICA engineering system that employs an object-oriented abstraction model for the hypermedia information. An object-oriented language describes components of the Web service that are easy to manage, reusable, highly dynamic and of polymorphic type, covering all elements of a complete Web site. The objects are accessible throughout the lifecycle for management and maintenance activities. A compiler maps the abstract service description to the file-based repository of a standard Web server. We demonstrate the feasibility of the engineering system on managing the Vienna International Festival Web site, a multilingual database Web application on culture and arts, containing 300+ static pages and several interactive services.

Abstract: Despite the tremendous penetration of the Web into a variety of markets, it has become increasingly clear that current Web structures are simply not well designed for customized information access. By creating CGI scripts, plug-ins, and gateways, and bolting all of it onto the Web in an ad hoc fashion, we have moved away from what could have been a carefully planned model for customized information access. If we implement changes now, before the current technology creates difficult-to-handle legacy structures, we might be able to make the Web a lot more useful. The author discusses the use of metatags, information customization and automated linking.

Abstract: We are creating a customizable, intelligent interface to the World-Wide Web that assists a user in locating specific, current, and relevant information. The Wisconsin Adaptive Web Assistant (WAWA) is capable of accepting instructions regarding what type of information that users are seeking and how to go about looking for it. WAWA compiles these instructions into neural networks, which means that the system’s behavior can be modified via training examples. Users can create these training examples by rating pages retrieved by WAWA, but more importantly the system uses techniques from reinforcement learning to internally create its own examples (users can also later provide additional instructions). WAWA uses these neural networks to guide its autonomous navigation of the Web, thereby producing an interface to the Web that users periodically instruct and which in the background searches the Web for relevant information, including periodically revisiting pages that change regularly.

Abstract: The World Wide Web is a distributed global information resource It contains a large amount of information that have been placed on the web independently by different organizations and thus, related information may appear across different web sites To manage and access heterogeneous information on WWW, we have started a project of building a web warehouse, called Whoweda (Warehouse of Web Data) Currently, our work on building a web warehousing system has focused on building a data model and designing a web algebra In this paper, we discuss design and research issues in a web warehousing system The issues include are designing algebraic operators for web information access and manipulation, web data visualization and web knowledge discovery These issues will not only overcome the limitations of available search engines but also provide powerful and friendly query mechanisms for retrieving useful information and knowledge discovery from a web warehouse

Abstract: A series of 20 interviews in four organizations explores the ways in which employees take advantage of personal web pages to support their work and to reflect who they are. Both interviewee comments and web page examples suggest the importance of individual personalization of information managcmcnt and dissemination, prcscntation and pcrccption of personality, and usage from the reader’s perspective. These results can inform the development of future web technologies for use in organititions. Furthermore, this self representation on web pages is a way of making individual knowledge more available in the workplace.

Abstract: In this information age, business leaders who are able to access more information and make use of it will likely be the winners in the marketplace. Among the different information sources and media, the Internet is a leading technology which facilitates information exchange internationally. Furthermore, the World Wide Web (WWW) is the most popular application on the Internet, used for many diversified business purposes including direct sales, advertisement, customer support, etc. The astonishing growth of WWW users is clear evidence of this. This study investigates how far electronic commerce, and in particular business use of the WWW has actually progressed in Hong Kong. The correlation between companies’ business types and their purposes of using Web pages through the WWW are also studied. By physically visiting the Web sites of Hong Kong’s commerce, a survey is conducted and the results are summarized.

Abstract: The World Wide Web is the largest collection of documents that ever existed. Users of this information space do need tools for simple and powerful retrieval of the information they are interested in. But the existing search tools have turned out to be insufficient. They either do not scale with the large amount of available data or their results are of low quality.