Aim
The goal of this course is to increase the understanding of methods for information collection, structuring and knowledge extraction, specially from Internet based sources.

Knowledge and understanding
For a passing grade the student must

• understand and use Web technology and standards

• analyze information source to create structured information

• understand the interaction between the functional components of a search engine

• understand the basics of Computational Intelligence like neural networks

Skills and abilities
For a passing grade the student must

• implement intelligent applications for knowledge extraction

• build simple topic specific Web search engines

Judgement and approach
For a passing grade the student must

• show skills to handle new methods and results

Contents
Introduction: Basic client/server architecture for WWW including technologies and standards like HTTP and HTML.

Dynamic Web applications: Use of cookies and scripts to introduce state in Web applications.

Structured information: XML based standards, to represent and transform structured information, like XSL, XPATH. Information retrieval techniques for indexing, searching, relevance ranking. Examples using Web services (SOAP,REST) and searching in structured databases (SRU/CQL).

Information collection: Techniques for general and focused web crawlers.

AI: Computational Intelligence (as Neural Networks) is presented and experimented with.

Integration: All is integrated in an intelligent Web-application that illustrates the interaction betwen components

Literature
Course notes and labs