Web Intelligence: A New Paradigm for Virtual Communities and Web Science

It´s well known that the web provides rich medium for communication, which goes far beyond the traditional communication media, such as radio, telephone, and television. The web has significant impacts on both academic research and everyday life. It revolutionizes the way in which information is gathered, stored, processed, presented, shared and used. In spite of its current technological advances, it´s still rather unclear what will be the next paradigm shift in the WWW. On the other hand, the integration of artificial intelligence, communication, Web technology and information systems yields what´s called Web intelligence (WI). It´s a new direction for scientific research and development that explores the fundamental roles as well as practical impacts of artificial intelligence and advance information technology on the next generation of Web empowered products, systems, services and activities. Recently WI is the one of the main components of both of the promising areas of research, Web Science and grid computing (GC). Grid computing is the backbone of the virtual communities and knowledge services, e.g. virtual hospital, virtual university, virtual organization, etc. This talk presents the current state of the research and the development in the WI areas as well as both theoretical and application aspects of WI. The promising area of Grid Computing and Web Science are also discussed.