Pattern recognition meets the world wide web

In the field of pattern recognition there are many problems that are now familiar to us, in a sense part of a standard problem set. This set includes both supervised and unsupervised learning (e.g. clustering). In fact these are the two major problems addressed by the field. These problems and the general pattern-recognition problem have appeared in many domains. Recently, they have even appeared in the context of something that is reshaping society and commerce - the world wide web. It is our intent here to discuss these two learning problems in that context in the hope of drawing the attention of the pattern-recognition community and in the hope of making that community aware of some of the more significant work that had been performed to date attacking these problems in the web context. © 2000 IEEE.