WAG: Web-at-A-Glance

The Internet revolution has made an enormous quantity of information availa ble to a disparate variety of people. The amount of information, the typica l access modality (that is, browsing), and the rapid growth of the Net, for ce the user, while searching for the information of interest, to dip into m ultiple sources, in a labyrinth of millions of links. Web-at-A-Glance (WAG) is a system allowing the user to query (instead of browsing) the Web. WAG performs this ambitious task by constructing a personalized database, perti nent to the user's interests. The system semi-automatically gleans the most relevant information from a Web site or several Web sites, stores them int o a database cooperatively designed with the user, and allows her/him to qu ery such a database through a visual interface equipped with a powerful mul timedia query language. This paper presents the design philosophy, the arch itecture and the core of the WAG system. A prototype WAG is being implement ed to test the feasibility of the proposed approach.