An ontological website models-supported search agent for web services

Abstract

In this paper, we advocate the use of ontology-supported website models to provide a semantic level solution for a search engine so that it can provide fast, precise and stable search results with a high degree of user satisfaction. A website model contains a website profile along with a set of webpage profiles. The former remembers the basic information of a website, while the latter contains the basic information, statistics information, and ontology information about each webpage stored in the website. Based on the concept, we have developed a Search Agent which manifests the following interesting features: (1) Ontology-supported construction of website models, by which we can attribute correct domain semantics into the Web resources collected in the website models. One important technique used here is ontology-supported classification (OntoClassifier). Our experiments show that the OntoClassifier performs very well in obtaining accurate and stable webpages classification to support correct annotation of domain semantics. (2) Website models-supported Website model expansion, by which we can collect Web resources based on both user interests and domain specificity. The core technique here is a Focused Crawler which employs progressive strategies to do user query-driven webpage expansion, autonomous website expansion, and query results exploitation to effectively expand the website models. (3) Website models-supported Webpage Retrieval, by which we can leverage the power of ontology features as a fast index structure to locate most-needed webpages for the user.