Of crawlers, portals, mice, and men

摘要

The World Wide Web is rapidly emerging as an important medium for transacting commerce as well as for the dissemination of information related to a wide range of topics (e.g., business, government, recreation). According to most predictions, the majority of human information will be available on the Web in ten years. These huge amounts of data raise a grand challenge for the database community, namely, how to turn the Web into a more useful information utility. This is exactly the subject that will be addressed by this panel.