Abstract:

Ontology-Based Web Site Mapping for Information Exploration

X. Zhu and S. Gauch and L. Gerhard and N. Kral and A. Pretschner


A centralized search process requires that the whole collection reside at a single site. This imposes a burden 
on both the system storage of the site and the network traffic near the site. This argues that the search process 
should be distributed. Recently, more and more Web sites provide the ability to search their local collection 
of Web pages. Query brokering systems are used to direct queries to the promising sites and merge the results 
from these sites. Creation of meta-information of the sites plays an important role in such systems - it is used 
by the query brokers to identify appropriate sites to send each query. In this article, we introduce an ontology-
based web site mapping method used to produce conceptual meta-information based. We present a series of 
experiments comparing our classification approach with Na"ive-Bayes approach, finding it more accurate. 
We also show how the automatically generated site map is used in distributed search, browsing and visualization 
in our multi-agent system, Obiwan.