Web-based information access

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