Web warehousing: an algebra for web information

While conventional keyword indexes maintained by web search engines such as Yahoo, Lycos, and World Wide Web Worm work well for most simple keyword searches, they are inadequate when more complex and structured queries involving the underlying hypertext structure of the World Wide Web are desired. Building from a database perspective, existing work to support such queries focuses on constructing SQL-like query languages for the WWW that assumes a relational abstraction of the WWW. Nonetheless, the WWW is a directed graph and imposing a relational abstraction filters out its inherent topological structure. We propose a data model for the WWW that retains its topological structure and construct a web algebra to manipulate objects in this model. The web algebra establishes a formal foundation from which different web query languages can be designed.