Soft Web Intelligence with the J-CO Framework

In the last two decades a plethora of approaches have been proposed to perform Web Intelligence to discover useful knowledge over the World-Wide Web. However, variety and vastness of the Web are still making this task a hard challenge. Nonetheless, the Web is evolving. An example is the advent of the JSON format as the practical standard for exchanging data over the Internet. In our previous work, we proposed the concept of Soft Web Intelligence: it is a modern interpretation of Web Intelligence based on the current technological panorama, in which JSON data sets can be gathered and stored within JSON document stores and processed by means of Soft Computing so as to Soft Querying them. Soft Web Intelligence is enabled by the J-CO Framework, a software tool that is natively able to manage, soft-query and transform collections of JSON documents, located either in NoSQL repositories or over the Internet. The paper illustrates our vision by presenting a plausible case study based on a weekly-updated data set that reports COVID-19 cases in European Countries.