Abstract
The proliferation of Internet and World Wide Web has created many technical and managerial opportunities and challenges for researchers and practitioners. In the Internet era, the increased information complexity and diversity as well as the uncontrolled information growth call for better information technologies for information identification, organization, analysis, dissemination, maintenance and quality assurance. On the other hand, the large amount of information available on the web not only facilitates organizational decision-making, but also empowers the development of advanced applications such as knowledge management and environmental scanning on the Internet. The strategic potentials of web information need to be explored. Finally, web information may have impacts on the way information is managed within organizations and on the rise of new information-based organizations. Thus, impacts of web information on competition, organizations, and market structures deserve more studies. The purpose of this mini-track is to share knowledge and findings from technical and managerial research on managing information on the Web.This year, we have accepted seven papers from twelve submissions. The first paper, “Assessing the Quality of Auction Web Sites,” by Barnes and Vidgen, proposed a new instrument for assessing the quality of Internet Sites from the perspective of users. Three quality dimensions were incorporated: information, interaction, and site design quality. The proposed instrument was evaluated in the domain of online auctions. The empirical results showed that it achieved a significant level of reliability.The second paper, “Feedback Mechanisms as Intermediaries for Web Information Market: An Exploratory Study,” by Wang and Day, investigated effects of feedback mechanism on perceived service quality. Empirical results suggested that both information providers and consumers preferred substantial and informative feedback mechanisms.The third paper, “Collection and Exploitation of Expert Knowledge in Web Assistant Systems,” by Aberg and Shahmehri, presented a web assistant system with the question-answering capability. Routine questions can be handled directly by the web assistant system, leaving unseen or difficult questions for the human. The field study showed that the proposed system was feasible and useful.The fourth paper, “A High-Density Catalog for Online Browsing,” by Spraragen and Podlaseck, presented an interface design for the High-Density Online Catalog (HDOC), which focused on the visualization of online catalogs in multiple dimensions. A usability study was conducted and several interested applications based on the HDOC design were discussed.The fifth paper, “Concepts of Bitemporal Database Theory and the Evolution of Web Documents,” by Knolmayer and Myrach, employed concepts of bitemporal databases to the management of web documents. Procedures for maintaining temporal integrity of web pages were proposed. Different approaches to supporting bitemporal information for web documents were outlined.The sixth paper, “Towards Hypermedia Support for Database Systems,” by Bhaumik et. al, explored the aspects of hypermedia support for database applications and proposed the Dynamic Hypermedia Engine (DHE) that provides automated linking and hypermedia services based on the application structures.Finally, the paper “Mining-based Category Evolution Approach to Managing Online Document Categories,” by Wei and Dong, proposed a mining-based category evolution (MiCE) technique to adjust document categories based on existing categories and their associated documents. Empirical resulted indicated that the proposed technique was more effective than the category discovery approach and was insensitive to the quality of original categories.Given the exploration of web information, the articles outlined here are samples of a large variety of research works. In the future, we believe that issues related to managing web information and converting web information into valuable knowledge will be critical to the competitiveness of a business.