Web Dynamics

The World-Wide-Web is a ubiquitous global tool, being used for finding information, communicating ideas, carrying out distributed computation, and conducting business, learning and science. The Web is highly dynamic in the nature and quantity of the information it encompasses. There is thus a need to understand how the information content and usage of the Web change, and to develop techniques for organising and processing information which handle and exploit its inherent dynamics. Access to the Web may be from a variety of devices and interfaces, different users at different locations with different needs, and at varying times. There is thus a need also for techniques which dynamically adapt information presentation and content to the mode of access and the specific user's requirements.

These topics are explored in the book Web Dynamics, Mark Levene and Alexandra Poulovassilis (eds.), Springer 2004.

Mark Levene and I organised the first Workshop on Web Dynamics in 2001, in conjunction with ICDT'01 in London. Following on from this workshop, we co-edited a special issue of Computer Networks (volume 39, No 3, June 2002). The papers in this special issue covered dynamic aspects of XML data management, mathematical models of web evolution, web searching, and web navigation.

We organised the 2nd Web Dynamics workshop in conjunction with WWW2002 and the topics discussed included web structure and web evolution, web information retrieval, adaptive hypermedia, and dynamic applications such as mobile information retrieval, event detection, and change propagation. These topics are explored in greater detail in the Web Dynamics book.

We organised the 3rd Web Dynamics workshop in conjunction with WWW2004, and a further special issue of the Computer Networks journal in July 2006 (volume 50, No 10).

Publications

Report on the 3rd Web Dynamics Workshop, at WWW'2004, M.Levene and A.Poulovassilis. ACM SIGMOD Record, 33(3), pp 91-95, 2004.

Web Dynamics, M.Levene and A.Poulovassilis (eds), Springer 2004.

Report on the 2nd Web Dynamics Workshop, at WWW'2002, M.Levene and A.Poulovassilis. ACM SIGMOD Record, 31(3), pp 72-26, 2002.

Web Dynamics, M.Levene and A.Poulovassilis. Software Focus, 2, pp 60-67, 2001.