WebML: Querying the World-Wide Web for Resources and Knowledge

There is a massive increase of information available on electronic networks. This profusion of resources on the WorldWide Web gave rise to considerable interest in the research community. Traditional information retrieval techniques have been applied to the document collection on the Internet, and a myriad of search engines and tools have been proposed and implemented. However, the e ectiveness of these tools is not satisfactory. None of them is capable of discovering knowledge from the Internet. We propose a declarative query language that would allow resource discovery on the Internet with interactive and progressively re ned inquiries. The language also consents to the discovery of knowledge within the content of the documents and the structure of the hyperspace.