Welcome from the WDA2003 Co-Chairs

 

 

It is our great honor and pleasure to welcome you to the Second International Workshop on Web Document Analysis - WDA2003.

 

With the ever-increasing use of the Web, a growing number of documents are published and accessed on-line. The emerging issues pose new challenges for Document Analysis. Although the development of XML and the new initiatives on the Semantic Web aim to improve the machine-readability of web documents, it is not likely to eliminate the need for content analysis. This is particularly true for the kind of web documents created as web publications (vs. services) where visual appearance is critical. Such content analysis is crucial for applications such as information extraction, web mining, summarization, content re-purposing for mobile and multi-modal access and web security. The need has become evident for discussions to identify the role of Document Analysis in this new technical landscape. To address this growing demand, the First International Workshop on Web Document Analysis (WDA2001) was held in Seattle on September 8, 2001, to enthusiastic response from the document research community.

 

The Second International Workshop on Web Document Analysis (WDA2003) builds on the success of the first one and continues to serve as a forum for discussing emerging issues in Document Analysis in Web environments. The nineteen accepted papers reflect the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of this field, touching on areas including document image processing, content extraction, web mining, web content repurposing, document modeling, annotation and human interactive proofs for web security. In addition, we have invited experts from these diverse areas for a panel discussion on the state of art and future directions of Web Document Analysis.

 

It is our hope that this workshop will bring together researchers from diverse research backgrounds and serve to stimulate new ideas, new collaborations and new research activities in the field of Web Document Analysis.

 

We would like to thank the members of the program committee for their thorough and prompt reviews and numerous constructive ideas; all contributing authors and panelists for their enthusiasm and support; and the organizers of ICDAR2003 for their generous help in making the organizational arrangements.

 

 

WDA2003 Co-Chairs

 

Apostolos Antonacopoulos and Jianying Hu