The World-Wide-Web is a ubiquitous, global tool, used for finding information, communicating ideas, carrying out distributed computation, and conducting business. The web is highly dynamic in the quantity and nature of the information that it encompasses, which poses a host of challenges. There is a need to understand how the information content and usage of the web change, and to develop techniques for organising and manipulating web information which can handle and exploit its inherent dynamics. Access to the web may be from a variety of devices and interfaces, different users at different locations, and at varying times. There is thus also a need for techniques which dynamically adapt information presentation to the mode of access and to the specific user requirements.
About the Author
Mark Levene undertook a PhD within the Database group at Birkbeck College, University of London. His PhD was in the area of Complex Objects and Nested Relational Structures, a theory which is providing an underpinning for XML data modeling and querying. On completing his PhD in 1990, Dr. Levene joined the Computer Science Department at University College London as a lecturer. He continued to research relational databases, specialising in the area of incomplete information, and in 1994 started working on web interaction and the navigation problem in hypertext. He was promoted at UCL to Senior Lecturer in 1997 and Reader in Knowledge Management in 2000. In 2001 he returned to Birkbeck as Professor of Computer Science. The issues of search and navigation in a web environment are central to Prof. Levene’s research, within the Database and Web Technologies group at Birkbeck. He is also currently interested in personalization of information, the mobile and ubiquitous web, and issues relating to the evolution of the web. He is the author of many papers, and has authored two books. Alex Poulovassilis undertook a PhD within the Database group at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her PhD was in the area of functional database languages, a paradigm which has influenced the development of query languages for object-oriented data and, more recently, for XML. She held a SERC postdoctoral fellowship at UCL during 1989-91 and her subsequent research has been in graph-based data models, schema integration, active databases, and extending the event-condition-action paradigm to XML data. After eight years at King’s College London as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer, she returned to Birkbeck as Reader in 1999 and Professor from January 2001. Her current research within the Database and Web Technologies group at Birkbeck focuses on heterogeneous information integration and dynamic Web applications, with application in bioinformatics and e-learning. She is co-editor of a forthcoming book on "Functional Approaches to Computing with Data" (Springer, 2003).
