Artificial Intelligence and the Web Special Track

The web has quickly grown from a modest hypertext system of interest to computer researchers to a ubiquitous information system including virtually all of human knowledge. Today’s Web provides ready access to not only text, images, and audio files, but also to structured and semistructured information, services and people. It offers an open, decentralized (and uncontrollable!) environment in which anyone can publish information and services coupled with powerful search engines and agents to find and rank results. All of this is available from wired, wireless, and mobile devices.

The result is an environment enormously useful to people for research, learning, commerce, socializing, communication, and entertainment. We have just begun to explore how this vast amount of machine accessible knowledge can be exploited and used by machines—to better serve human needs as well as to discover new knowledge.

The special track on “AI and the Web” features technical papers on the use of AI techniques, systems, and concepts involving the Web. The emphasis is on papers in two active research areas: (1) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (2) developing and exploiting “Semantic Web” languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Innovative papers in other areas describing research involving both AI and the Web are included.