Mission-Critical Web Applications: a Seismological Case

We are passing from a world in which information management lies in the hands of a few devotees to one of widespread and diffuse consumption of information. Raw data is of little practical use; what counts is the knowledge that can be extracted from plain information to support decisional processes and scientific analysis and to synthesize documentation. Multimedia information is rich and easy to use for humans, who draw on it regularly to carry out their activities and communicate the results obtained. But the mass of information now available is so great that it must be organized to improve its usability. And the automatic structuring of the large amount of raw data at our disposal is quite a difficult job: approaches coming from the database community, keen to generate well-structured multidatabases and suitable query languages, are intermingled with contributions from the uncontrolled, unexplored, and unpredictable interaction of a multitude of people who require assistance to navigate hypermedia space. The automatic organization of multimedia information raises the important problem of content emergence, which can be succinctly expressed in two questions: What is required to find and focus on a particular set of information? and What path do we take, instead of the traditional geographical one, through those information centers with the greater probability of satisfying the seeker's need