Large collections of documents containing various types of multimedia, are made available to the WWW. Unfortunately, due to the un-structuredness of Internet environments it is hard to find specific information when one is looking for it. Search engines available can only rely their results on information retrieval techniques and most of the time they lack the desired power in query formulation. Modelling data on the web, as if it was designed for use within databases, should provide us with the necessary basis for enhancing this query formulation. This of course requires special care for dealing with the included multimedia data and the semi-structured aspects of data on the web. Modelling the entire web would be too ambitious, therefore we focus on a more feasible environment, like the intranet, where one can find large collections of related data. With the webspace method we have already shown how to deal with the various aspects of semi-structured data in large collections of r...
Roelof van Zwol, Peter M. G. Apers