Web Data Management Practices: Emerging Techniques and Technologies

Citation

Bar‐Ilan, J. (2007), "Web Data Management Practices: Emerging Techniques and Technologies", Online Information Review, Vol. 31 No. 5, pp. 716-717. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520710832469

This edited book reviews and discusses existing and emerging techniques for analysing and managing data available on the web. As the web continues to grow, more and more scalable techniques are needed to analyze, handle and present information.

Although, according to the preface of the book, the intended audience is both technical and non‐technical readers, when the editors discuss the specific reader groups, these are computer science researchers, instructors and students and the general computing community. Thus all reader types are expected to have a rather strong background in computer science. Most of the chapters are rather technical; however, some of the chapters include case studies as well.

The book is divided into four sections: Web data mining, Content management on the web, Web information integration and applications, and Web services for data accessing. The first section consists of four chapters – three of them are on clustering documents, users and search results, and the fourth is on association rules for XML documents.

The second section concentrates on issues related to dynamic web documents, caching and prediction of data requests and mobility for wireless networks. Section 3 discusses the advantages of using a conceptual model for web data mining. The three main mining problems identified are: identification of frequent crawling paths, user communities and critical situations. Another major challenge on the web is the integration of heterogeneous data sources. The proposed integration technique in this book is the use of the MDBS (multi‐database system) technique. The last chapter in this section is on email mining, which enables categorization, summarization, automatic answering and spam filtering.

The fourth section concentrates on web services and service‐oriented computing, provides an overview of existing Web service composition techniques, and reviews approaches, and discusses architectures and techniques for providing QOS (quality of service) data access in web services systems.

Each of the 12 chapters of the book has an extensive reference list, allowing the reader to learn more about the discussed issues. The book is truly international; the authors of the chapters are from ten different countries, giving the work a global perspective on web data management practices.