Hypertext Databases and Data Mining

The volume of unstructured text and hypertext data far exceeds that of structured data. Text and hypertext are used for digital libraries, product catalogs, reviews, newsgroups, medical reports, customer service reports, and the like. Currently measured in billions of dollars, the worldwide internet activity is expected to reach a trillion dollars by 2002. Database researchers have kept some cautious distance from this action. The goal of this tutorial is to expose database researchers to text and hypertext information retrieval (IR) and mining systems, and to discuss emerging issues in the overlapping areas of databases, hypertext, and data mining.