Web Warehousing: Design and Issues

The World Wide Web is a distributed global information resource. It contains a large amount of information that have been placed on the web independently by different organizations and thus, related information may appear across different web sites. To manage and access heterogeneous information on WWW, we have started a project of building a web warehouse, called Whoweda (Warehouse of Web Data). Currently, our work on building a web warehousing system has focused on building a data model and designing a web algebra. In this paper, we discuss design and research issues in a web warehousing system. The issues include are designing algebraic operators for web information access and manipulation, web data visualization and web knowledge discovery. These issues will not only overcome the limitations of available search engines but also provide powerful and friendly query mechanisms for retrieving useful information and knowledge discovery from a web warehouse.