Conceptual Views over the Web

The Internet has made available an enormous quantity of information 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 puz zled user to search the information of interest in a labyrinth of billions of links This is very di erent from traditional database querying where the user has just the duty of specifying which are the data s he wants to retrieve We argue that in order to provide the user with a powerful and friendly query mechanism for accessing information on the Web the criti cal problem is to nd e ective ways to build models of the information of interest In this paper we motivate the above obser vation by presenting notable attempts to con struct systems which model the information in the Web following di erent approaches We rst classify such systems in two categories as being based on Database or Knowledge Representation techniques and discuss their main advantages and disadvantages Then we brie y introduce an integrated approach in which Knowledge Representation mecha nisms and reasoning capabilities are coupled with traditional Database features such as ef The copyright of this paper belongs to the papers authors Per mission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage Proceedings of the th KRDB Workshop Athens Greece August F Baader M A Jeusfeld W Nutt eds http sunsite informatik rwth aachen de Publications CEUR WS Vol cient data management and query optimiza tion