Semantic History: Ontology-Based Modeling of Users’ Web Browsing Behaviors for Improved Web Page Revisitation

Abstract

Web Browsers are software solutions that facilitate users in browsing the Web. However, the huge size of the Web makes it difficult to find relevant resources, resulting in information and cognitive overload. To mitigate this overload, researchers have attempted to find ways for re-visitation of web pages that are deemed useful and more likely to be revisited. Also, web browsers have several built-in tools including history, bookmarks, backward & forward buttons, Uniform Resource Locator (URL) auto-completion, and so on. This research focuses on web browser history, which maintains details of visited web pages with their associated metadata to enable users in finding and re-finding (revisitation) web pages without encountering the information and cognitive overload. In addition to the built-in history tools in web browsers, several third-party tools in the form of toolbars, extensions, and add-ons are available. However, these solutions exploit no or limited web page-level semantics and fail to provide full revisitation support to the users. It is, therefore, necessary to fill this semantic gap by exploiting web page-level semantics, which is the aim of this paper. We contribute “Browser History Ontology,” and use it in our developed Chrome-based browser extension, namely “Semantic History.” Experimental results show that our proposed solution provides better re-visitation support to the users by semantically organizing the web browser history.