Web Dynamics: Adapting to Change in Content, Size, Topology and Use

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.

 

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 and e-learning. She is co-editor of a forthcoming book on "Functional Approaches to Computing with Data" (Springer, 2003).