CONSTRUCTING A PERSONAL WEB MAP WITH ANYTIME-CONTROL OF WEB ROBOTS

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a [Formula: see text] (Personal Web Map) which is a personal and small database of interesting Web pages to a user and develop a method to construct it under the user's control of multiple Web robots. While general search engines with very large databases are valid for information retrieval in the WWW, it is still important that a user constructs a small, personal database of relevant Web pages to his/her interest. For such a Web page database, we propose a [Formula: see text] and develop a [Formula: see text] system. First a user gives keywords indicating his/her interest to a system, and it constructs a [Formula: see text] concerned with the keywords. For building a useful [Formula: see text], it is necessary that a user can interrupt the construction of a [Formula: see text] anytime and instruct a sub-field which should be explored more. For this function, we develop an anytime-control algorithm for multiple Web robots. A density blackboard is used for controlling Web robots, and an uniform distributed [Formula: see text] is built. Whenever a system is interrupted by a user, it provides a valid [Formula: see text] in terms of keeping search space wide, and indicates many alternatives on which he/she wants more information. From Web pages in a database, document vectors are generated and used to construct a 2D-map of a [Formula: see text] by using self-organization maps. A user easily recognizes interim results through the 2D-map, and gives instruction by clicking a node about which he/she wants more detail information. We made experiments by subjects and found out that our method outperformed breadth-first search for constructing a useful [Formula: see text]. As results, a [Formula: see text] system is considered as a promising approach to assist a user in gathering relevant information in the WWW.