Workshop PC Chairs’ Message

Through the Web, huge amounts of information are now widely accessible. As a matter of fact, the Web can be seen as a large corpus accessed through Web-based Information Systems (WIS) which rely on classical client/server, n-tier or even services-oriented architectures. Due to recent advances in wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies, these WIS can now be used by nomadic as well as sedentary users, connecting from different kinds of access devices (workstation, laptop, PDA, mobile phones, etc.).

Considering the Web as a huge and growing corpus, one of the main challenges of WIS designers is to prevent users from experiencing the all too prevalent cognitive and informational overload. Meeting this goal guarantees to some extent the usability and the durability of a WIS. While in the field of Information Retrieval some solutions have been proposed to query specialized and limited corpora with good performances, access to information on the Web as a whole has still to cope with the limited capabilities of existing search engines.