Arno Scharl is Professor of Information System at the University of Western Australia and founder of the ECOresearch Network. He completed his doctoral studies at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Additionally, he holds a PhD and MSc from the University of Vienna, Department of Sports Physiology. Fellowships with the University of California at Berkeley and Curtin University of Technology laid the foundation for his monograph on 'Evolutionary Web Development'. Current research interests focus on automated Web assessment, media monitoring and environmental online communication.

Albert Weichselbraun is a Research Fellow with the University of Western Australia's Business School. After completing two Master degrees in Economics and Chemical Engineering with honours, his doctoral thesis at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration focused on ontology-based text classification. Albert joined the project in June 2004 to lead its technical development. He has an interdisciplinary background in statistics, mathematical modelling, semantic Web technology and system development with Python/Zope/Plone.

Christian Bauer has been involved in the development of numerous commercial Web information systems since 1994. Christian holds a doctorate in information systems from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He has published more than 30 articles on Web information systems and electronic commerce. Previous academic employments include Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Department of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration and a post-doctoral fellowship at Curtin University of Technology.

Acknowledgements. Our first word of appreciation goes to the UWA Business School for their financial support, to the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (VUEBA) for additional network and hardware resources, and to ATnet for providing a voice-over IP line. We also thank Astrid Dickinger, Wilhelm Langenberger, Wei Liu, Jamie Murphy, Antonijo Nikolic, Maya Purushothaman, Dave Webb, Mark Winkler and other members of the ECOresearch Network for their valuable help and suggestions.

Technical Specifications. Implemented under Red Hat Linux and based on the webLyzard technology, the project utilizes the Plone content management system for interface design and dynamic content provision. As an integral part of the data gathering component, the HTTrack Web mirroring tool captures raw data from publicly available Web sites. Back-end server functions such as process control, data pre-processing and textual analysis were coded in Python, with a relational MySQL database as the central repository for storing and retrieving Web documents.