Web intelligence: New frontiers of exploration

Web Intelligence (WI) deals with the scientific exploration of the new territories of the Web. As a new field of computer science, it combines artificial intelligence and advanced information technology in the context of the Web, and goes beyond each of them. From several perspectives of the Web, we investigate the scope, goals, challenges, and future development of WI. Intelligent web information systems can be designed and implemented to explore the structures of the Web, and data, information, and knowledge on the Web and to provide efficient and effective communication, collaboration, information and resources sharing, and better services. As an examples to illustrate the basic ideas, web-based support systems are discussed.