The Internet is a massive and continuously-growing source of data and information on subjects ranging from breaking news to personal anecdotes to objective documentation. It has proven to be a hugely beneficial resource for researchers, giving them a source of free, upto- date, real-world data that can be used in a varied range of projects and applications. Hundreds of new algorithms and systems are being proposed each year to filter out desired information from this seemingly endless amount of data, to clean and organize it, to infer knowledge from it and to act on this knowledge.

Cite: Richard Khoury, "Guest Editorial—Special Issue: Web Data Mining," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 205-206, August 2012. doi:10.4304/jetwi.4.3.205-206