Letter from the guest editors
Virgilio Augusto Fernandes Almeida
DCC - UFMG
The explosive growth of the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW) made the value of networked communications on a global scale attractive and useful to masses of people. Millions of Web sites, on every possible topic, are available on the Internet. People use the information on the Web for their leisure and for their jobs. Recently, a large number of companies are moving to the Web to do business. The Internet and the World-Wide Web are becoming an universal and ubiquitous marketplace relevant to all commercial activities. All the above points are mentioned to emphasize the importance of this issue of the Journal of the Braziliam Computer Society (JBCS), devoted to topics related to the World-Wide Web.
We received 16 paper submissions from Brazil, USA and other countries. Three of the submissions were recommended by the Programme Committee of the 1998 Conference of the Computer Brazilian Society (SBC). These three papers were awarded as the three best papers of the conference. In selecting the articles to appear in this issue, we followed a blind refereeing process for the three papers recommended by the Programme Committee of the SBC Conference. That is, the identity and affiliations of authors were kept separate from the actual work under review. The reviewers did not, in the three cases, know who wrote the papers they refereed.
The phenomenal growth of the World-Wide Web, in both the volume of information on it and the numbers of users desiring access to it, is dramatically increasing the performance requirements for large scale information servers. WWW server performance is a central issue in providing ubiquitous, reliable, and efficient information access. As a consequence, many researchers are attacking the problem of improving the Web infrastructure. In this issue, we have four articles covering different aspects of the Web infrastructure. The articles are related to caching and mirroring, that have been considered key issues for the Internet and WWW scalability.
Although the Web has been characterized as the world's digital library for the digital age, it is evident that the WWW was not designed to support retrieval information as libraries are. The Web contains not only books and papers, but video, audio recording and many different forms of digital documents. In many aspects, the Web has been viewed as a chaotic repository of digital information. Anyone who has ever sought information on the Web understands the importance of techniques for representing, searching and retrieving information in the WWW. In this issue, we have two articles that deal with techniques for improving the representation of hypermedia documents and accucary of search engines.
Finally, I would like to thank all of you who submitted your work for this special issue of the JBCS. The success of this issue is measured partly by your contributions. I want to thank our reviewers for their hard work and careful attention to ensuring the quality of the selected articles. I also want to give special thanks to the editor of the JBCS, Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, and to Cristina Murta, who acted as an assistant editor to this issue.
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
04 Feb 1999 -
Date of issue
Nov 1998
