Conceptual Views over the Web.
Tiziana Catarci, Luca Iocchi, Daniele Nardi, Giuseppe Santucci · 1997
The Internet has made available an enormous quantity of information 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 puzzled user to search the information of interest in a labyrinth of billions of links. This is very different from traditional database querying, where the user has just the duty of specifying which are the data s/he wants to retrieve. We argue that, in order to provide the user with a powerful and friendly query mechanism for accessing information on the Web, the critical problem is to find effective ways to build models of the information of interest. In this paper we motivate the above observation by presenting notable attempts to construct systems which model the information in the Web following different approaches. We first classify such systems in two categories, as being based on Database or Knowledge Representation techniques, and discuss thei...