Acquiring knowledge and information on alternative energy from the world wide web

Uncertainty over future oil prices, concerns over and energy security and increasing agreement over an urgent need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to avoid unacceptable temperature increases and climate change have combined to generate strong interest in low emission energy supply options, including increased efficiency of energy use and renewable energy technologies. These energy options, variously labelled as clean energy, renewable energy, sustainable energy or alternative energy, need to be rapidly developed and deployed in order to reduce the current heavy reliance on fossil fuels. The distribution of information and knowledge on these technologies is critical to this goal. The need to obtain such information will be more acute for developing countries such as Thailand as funding and support for scientific research and technological development in these countries is relatively limited and the ability to gather relevant information and knowledge via the World Wide Web will therefore be of particular importance in promoting know-how to local communities. This paper presents the outcomes of the first phase of a research project that aims to improve the extraction and visualization of alternative energy information from the Web. This paper reports a survey and study of 113 Web sites on alternative energy and examines the deployment of Web technologies by these Web sites. This will lead to the design and development of information extraction and visualization methodologies in the subsequent phases of the study.