Accessing the Web: Exploiting the Data Base Paradigm

The open growth of the Internet the amount of available information and the typical access modality i e browsing cause the puzzled user to search for the information of interest in a labyrinth of links Web at a Glance WAG is a system aiming to allow the user to query instead of browsing the Web The basic idea is to build once the user has speci ed a generic domain of interest the domain conceptual representation to instantiate it with data extracted from Web sites so to build a materialized view over the Web and to query such a conceptual representation through an easy to use visual interface Knowledge representation techniques are used for both the internal modeling of the conceptual representation and for supporting the automatic extraction of data from Web sites to feed the materialized view