Web-based information access

摘要

The need for friendly environments for effective informationaccess is further enforced by the growth of the global Internet, whichis causing a dramatic change in both the kind of people who access theinformation and the types of information itself (ranging fromunstructured multimedia data to traditional record-oriented data). Tocope with these new demands, the interaction techniques traditionallyoffered to the users have to evolve and eventually integrate in apowerful interface to the global information infrastructure. The newinteraction mechanisms must be especially friendly and easy-to-use,since, given the enormous quantity of information sources available onthe Internet, most of the users remain “permanent novices”with respect to each one of the sources they have access to. The articleoffers a survey of the main approaches adopted for letting the userseffectively interact with the Web. Thus, it covers topics related withboth extracting the information of interest spread over existing Websites and building new, more usable sites. Being mainly“user-centered”, the article analyzes proposals coming fromdifferent areas, namely DB, AI, and HCI, which share the final goal ofmaking the Web a huge, easy-to-access information repository