Welcome from the WDA2001 Co-Chairs

 It is our great honor and pleasure to welcome you to the First International Workshop on Web Document Analysis - WDA2001.

 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 and Content Extraction. While there has been active research on Web Content Extraction using text-based techniques, documents are in fact 2-dimensional entities, and often include multimedia content. Hence, techniques that have been developed for image-based documents could prove valuable in the realm of Web documents, and new methods for the analysis of multimedia content will be required.

This workshop is intended as a forum for discussing emerging issues in document analysis in Web environments. The papers submitted to the workshop reflect the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of this field, touching on areas including document image processing, layout and structure analysis, information retrieval, content extraction, and digital document modeling. In addition, we have invited experts from Document Image Analysis, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Semi-Structured Databases and Multi-Modal Web Access for an opening 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 emerging field of Web Document Analysis.

Many people helped in making this workshop a reality. We would like to thank members of the program committee for their thorough and prompt reviews and numerous constructive ideas; all contributing authors for their enthusiasm and support; and the organizers of ICDAR'01 for their support and generous help in making the organizational arrangements.

 

WDA2001 Co-Chairs

Apostolos Antonacopoulos and Jianying Hu