Accessing the web: from search to integration

Abstract

We have witnessed the rapid growth of the Web-- It has not only "broadened" but also "deepened": While the "surface Web" has expanded from the 1999 estimate of 800 million to the recent 19.2 billion pages reported by Yahoo index, an equally or even more significant amount of information is hidden on the "deep Web," behind query forms, recently estimated at over 1.2 million, of online databases. Accessing the information on the Web thus requires not only search to locate pages of interests, from the surface Web, but also integration to aggregate data from alternative or complementary sources, from the deep Web. Although the opportunities are unprecedented, the challenges are also immense: On the one hand, for the surface Web, while search seems to have evolved into a standard technology, its maturity and pervasiveness have also invited the attack of spam and the demand of personalization. On the other hand, for the deep Web, while the proliferation of structured sources has promised unlimited possibilities for more precise and aggregated access, it has also presented new challenges for realizing large scale and dynamic information integration. These issues are in essence related to data management, in a large scale, and thus present novel problems and interesting opportunities for our research community. This tutorial will discuss the new access scenarios and research problems in Web information access: from search of the surface Web to integration of the deep Web.