Web Dynamics

The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous global tool, used for finding infor mation, communicating ideas, carrying out distributed computation and conducting business, learning and science. The Web is highly dynamic in both the content and quantity of the information that it encompasses. In order to fully exploit its enormous potential as a global repository of information, we need to understand how its size, topology and content are evolv ing. This then allows the development of new techniques for locating and retrieving information that are better able to adapt and scale to its change and growth. The Web's users are highly diverse and can access the Web from a variety of devices and interfaces, at different places and times, and for varying purposes. We thus also need techniques for personalising the presentation and content of Web based information depending on how it is being accessed and on the specific user's requirements. As well as being accessed by human users, the Web is also accessed by appli cations. New applications in areas such as e-business, sensor networks, and mobile and ubiquitous computing need to be able to detect and react quickly to events and changes in Web-based information. Traditional approaches using query-based 'pull' of information to find out if events or changes of interest have occurred may not be able to scale to the quantity and frequency of events and changes being generated, and new 'push' -based techniques are needed.

Explains in detail how to deal with permanently changing web content Explains in detail how to adapt web presentation to different user needs Only book with a broad coverage of the specific dynamic aspects of the Web Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Mark Levene undertook a PhD within the Database group at Birkbeck College, University of London. His PhD was in the area of Complex Objects and Nested Relational Structures, a theory which is providing an underpinning for XML data modeling and querying. On completing his PhD in 1990, Dr. Levene joined the Computer Science Department at University College London as a lecturer. He continued to research relational databases, specialising in the area of incomplete information, and in 1994 started working on web interaction and the navigation problem in hypertext. He was promoted at UCL to Senior Lecturer in 1997 and Reader in Knowledge Management in 2000. In 2001 he returned to Birkbeck as Professor of Computer Science. The issues of search and navigation in a web environment are central to Prof. Levene's research, within the Database and Web Technologies group at Birkbeck. He is also currently interested in personalization of information, the mobile and ubiquitous web, and issues relating to the evolution of the web. He is the author of many papers, and has authored two books.

Alex Poulovassilis undertook a PhD within the Database group at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her PhD was in the area of functional database languages, a paradigm which has influenced the development of query languages for object-oriented data and, more recently, for XML. She held a SERC postdoctoral fellowship at UCL during 1989-91 and her subsequent research has been in graph-based data models, schema integration, active databases, and extending the event-condition-action paradigm to XML data. After eight years at King's College London as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer, she returned to Birkbeck as Reader in 1999 and Professor from January 2001. Her current research within the Database and Web Technologies group at Birkbeck focuses on heterogeneous information integration and dynamic Web applications, with application in bioinformatics ande-learning. She is co-editor of a forthcoming book on "Functional Approaches to Computing with Data" (Springer, 2003).

Klappentext

The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous tool for finding information, performing distributed computation, and conducting business, learning and science. In order to fully exploit its huge potential as a global information repository, we need to understand the dynamics of the Web. Levene and Poulovassilis set the scene by giving an overview of the ways in which the Web is dynamic in its content, size, topology and use, and they point to some of the technical challenges caused by its dynamic nature. The subsequent contributions from leading experts are structured into four parts: evolution of the Web's structure and content, searching and navigating the Web, handling events and change on the Web, and personalized access to the Web. The authors describe the current state of the art in areas such as methods for identifying Web communities, Web navigation and crawling, measuring how well search engines cope with change, Active XML and Active XQuery, adaptive hypermedia, and personalization in mobile portals. The overall result is a coherent, comprehensive picture of the field.The book introduces the reader to this exciting field, as well as being a lasting source of reference for researchers and professionals who are engaged with the Web.

Inhalt
Web Dynamics Setting the Scene.- I Evolution of Web Structure and Content; Introduction.- How Large Is the World Wide Web?.- Methods for Mining Web Communities: Bibliometric, Spectral, and Flow.- Theory of Random Networks and Their Role in Communications Networks.- Web Dynamics, Structure, and Page Quality.- II Searching and Navigating the Web; Introduction.- Navigating the World Wide Web.- Crawling the Web.- Combining Link and Content Information in Web Search.- Search Engine Ability to Cope With the Changing Web.- III Events and Change on the Web; Introduction.- An EventConditionAction Language for XML.- Active XQuery.- Active XML: A Data-Centric Perspective on Web Services.- WebVigiL: An Approach to Just-In-Time Information Propagation in Large Network-Centric Environments.- DREAM: Distributed Reliable Event-Based Application Management.- IV Personalized Access to the Web; Introduction.- A Survey of Architectures for Adaptive Hypermedia.- Adaptive Web-Based Educational Hypermedia.- MP3 Mobile Portals, Profiles and Personalization.- Learning Web Request Patterns.