Maarten van Someren - Böcker

This work presents developments and applications in the area of computational intelligence, which essentially describes methods and approaches that mimic biologically intelligent behaviour in order to solve problems that have been difficult to solve by classical mathematics. Fuzzy technology, artificial neural nets and evolutionary computing are considered to be such approaches. The Editors have assembled contributions in the areas of fuzzy sets, neural sets and machine learning, as well as combinations of them (so-called hybrid methods) in the first part of the book. The second part of the book is dedicated to applications in the areas that are considered to be most relevant to computational intelligence.

In the last years, research on Web mining has reached maturity and has broadened in scope. Two different but interrelated research threads have emerged, based on the dual nature of the Web: – The Web is a practically in?nite collection of documents: The acquisition and - ploitation of information from these documents asks for intelligent techniques for information categorization, extraction and search, as well as for adaptivity to the interests and background of the organization or person that looks for information. – The Web is a venue for doing business electronically: It is a venue for interaction, information acquisition and service exploitation used by public authorities, n- governmental organizations, communities of interest and private persons. When observed as a venue for the achievement of business goals, a Web presence should be aligned to the objectives of its owner and the requirements of its users. This raises the demand for understandingWeb usage, combining it with other sources of knowledge inside an organization, and deriving lines of action. ThebirthoftheSemanticWebatthebeginningofthedecadeledtoacoercionofthetwo threadsintwoaspects:(i)theextractionofsemanticsfromtheWebtobuildtheSemantic Web;and(ii)theexploitationofthesesemanticstobettersupportinformationacquisition and to enhance the interaction for business and non-business purposes. Semantic Web mining encompasses both aspects from the viewpoint of knowledge discovery.

Finding knowledge – or meaning – in data is the goal of every knowledge d- covery e?ort. Subsequent goals and questions regarding this knowledge di?er amongknowledgediscovery(KD) projectsandapproaches. Onecentralquestion is whether and to what extent the meaning extracted from the data is expressed in a formal way that allows not only humans but also machines to understand and re-use it, i. e. , whether the semantics are formal semantics. Conversely, the input to KD processes di?ers between KD projects and approaches. One central questioniswhetherthebackgroundknowledge,businessunderstanding,etc. that the analyst employs to improve the results of KD is a set of natural-language statements, a theory in a formal language, or somewhere in between. Also, the data that are being mined can be more or less structured and/or accompanied by formal semantics. These questions must be asked in every KD e?ort. Nowhere may they be more pertinent, however, than in KD from Web data (“Web mining”). Thisis due especially to the vast amounts and heterogeneity of data and ba- ground knowledge available for Web mining (content, link structure, and - age), and to the re-use of background knowledge and KD results over the Web as a global knowledge repository and activity space. In addition, the (Sem- tic) Web can serve as a publishing space for the results of knowledge discovery from other resources, especially if the whole process is underpinned by common ontologies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Ninth European Conference on Machine Learning, ECML-97, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 1997.This volume presents 26 revised full papers selected from a total of 73 submissions. Also included are an abstract and two papers corresponding to the invited talks as well as descriptions from four satellite workshops. The volume covers the whole spectrum of current machine learning issues.