WAIF: Web of asynchronous information filters

Abstract

The Internet is seeing a rapid increase in on-line newspapers and advertising for new products and sales. Yet only primitive mechanisms are available to help users discover and obtain that subset of these news items likely to be of interest. Current search engines are really only first step. For locating news providers, word-of-mouth and mass mailings are still used; for retrieval of news items, users are forced to poll web sites regularly or provide e-mail addresses for follow-up mailings. WAIF is a new framework to facilitate easy user access for Internet users to relevant news items. WAIF supports new kinds of browsers, personalized filters, recommendation systems, and - most importantly - an evolution path intended to enable efficient deployment of new techniques that enhance the user retrieval experience. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.