This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the First Asia- Paci?c Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2001) held in Maebashi TERRSA, Maebashi City,Japan,October 23-26,2001. It was sponsored by ACM SIGART and Maebashi Institute of Technology,in cooperation with ACM SIGCHI,ACM SIGWEB,the Japanese Society for Arti?cial Intelligence (JSAI),JSAI SIGFAI, JSAI SIGKBS,and IEICE SIGKBSE. The conference was held jointly with the Second Asia-Paci?c Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2001). WI 2001 was the ?rst conference on a new and emerging sub?eld of computer science known as Web Intelligence. It provided an international forum for re- archers and practitioners to present the state of the art in the development of Web intelligence,to examine performance characteristics of various approaches in Web-based intelligent information technology,and to cross-fertilize ideas on the development of Web-based intelligent information systems among di?erent domains.
By idea-sharing and discussions on the underlying foundations and the enabling technologies of Web intelligence,we hoped to stimulate the future development of new models,new methodologies,and new tools for building a variety of embodiments of Intelligent Web Information Systems (IWIS). In spite of its name,WI 2001 was truly an international conference that - tracted 153 full-length research paper submissions from 31 countries and regions of all continents. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three experts on the basis of technical soundness,relevance,originality,signi?cance,and clarity.