The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous tool for finding information, performing distributed computation, and conducting business, learning and science. In order to fully exploit its huge potential as a global information repository, we need to understand the dynamics of the Web. Levene and Poulovassilis set the scene by giving an overview of the ways in which the Web is dynamic in its content, size, topology and use, and they point to some of the technical challenges caused by its dynamic nature. The subsequent contributions from leading experts are structured into four parts: evolution of the Web's structure and content, searching and navigating the Web, handling events and change on the Web, and personalized access to the Web. The authors describe the current state of the art in areas such as methods for identifying Web communities, Web navigation and crawling, measuring how well search engines cope with change, Active XML and Active XQuery, adaptive hypermedia, and personalization in mobile portals. The overall result is a coherent, comprehensive picture of the field.
The book introduces the reader to this exciting field, as well as being a lasting source of reference for researchers and professionals who are engaged with the Web.