Building virtual web views

We are so used to the ubiquitous World-Wide Web (WWW') that we take it for granted. There is no need to emphasize how dynamic, large, rich, and unstru ctured, yet important the web is. From researchers and engineers to childre n and retired elderly, everyone uses the WWW for a variety of needs. A mult itude of tools and search engines were developed to find and retrieve resou rces from the web. However, everyone knows how frustrating the experience w ith search engines can be. It is very difficult to find, if ever found, rel evant information or patterns from within resources on the Internet. The id ea presented in this paper is to "warehouse" the web in a structure that wo uld allow efficient information retrieval and knowledge discovery from the Internet. Warehousing the web in this context consists of creating differen t virtual web views with layered databases of descriptors organized hierarc hicly. Using a declarative adhoc mining language, one can find and pinpoint explicit as well as implicit knowledge from the web warehouse. (C) 2001 El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.