WAG: Web-At-a-Glance

The Internet revolution has made an enormous quantity of information available to a disparate variety of people. The amount of information, the typical access modality (i.e. browsing), and the open growth of the Net, force the user, while searching for the information of interest, to dip into multiple sources, in a labyrinth of billion of links. Web-at-a-Glance (WAG) is a system allowing the user to query (instead of browsing) the World Wide Web. WAG performs this ambitious task by constructing a personalized database, pertinent to the user's interests. The system semi-automatically gleans the most relevant information from a Web site or several Web sites, stores it into a database, cooperatively designed with the user, and allows him/her to query such a database through a visual interface equipped with a powerful multimedia query language. This paper presents the design philosophy, the architecture and the core of the WAG system. A prototype WAG is being implemented to test the feasibility of the proposed approach.

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