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Abstract : |
The Internet revolution has made an enormous quantity of information available to a disparate variety of people. The amount of information, the typical access modality (i.e. browsing), and the open growth of the Net, force the user, while searching for the information of interest, to dip into multiple sources, in a labyrinth of billion of links, often resulting in both user's disorientation and cognitive overhead. This is very different from traditional database querying, where the available information is much limited, but the user has just the duty of specifying which are the data s/he wants to retrieve in order to obtain them. Web-at-a-Glance (WAG) is a system aiming at solving the above problems by allowing the user to query (instead of browsing) the Web. WAG performs this ambitious task by constructing a personalized database, pertinent to the user's interests. The system semi-automatically gleans the most relevant information from a Web site or several Web sites, stores it into a database, cooperatively designed with the user, and allows her/him to query such a database through a visual interface equipped with a powerful multimedia query language. This paper presents the design philosophy, the architecture and the core of the WAG system, comprising two basic modules, namely the page classifier and the conceptualizer. The page classifier, |
