Previous: IICA: An Ontology-based Internet Navigation System
Up: IICA: An Ontology-based Internet Navigation System
Next: Ontology
Previous Page: IICA: An Ontology-based Internet Navigation System
Next Page: Ontology

Introduction

As the number and diversity of information sources on the Internet is increasing rapidly, there is an increase demand for intelligent assistants which would help people search for desired information.

A number of tools are available to help people search for information on the Internet such as WWW Worm [5], WebCrawler [7] Unfortunately, existing tools are unable to interpret the content of information resources due to the lack of knowledge. We need more intelligent systems which facilitate personal activities of producing information such as surveying, writing papers and so on.

In this paper, we present IICA which gathers, classifies, and reorganizes information from heterogeneous information resources on the Internet. Ontology plays an important role in IICA. It specifies the common background knowledge shared by the user and IICA, allows IICA to make inexact match between the user's request and the candidates, and assigns user-oriented categories. Figure 1 shows the outline of IICA.

This system has the following functions. (1) Information Gathering: IICA gathers WWW pages on the Internet in response to user's requests. IICA uses ontologies to compute the similarity between the keywords given by the user and those extracted from candidate pages. (2) Information Categorizing: IICA categorizes the gathered pages by linking them with an ontology and (3) Information Reorganizing: IICA extracts specific information form pages using heuristics based on expression patterns and phrases (See Figure 2).

We tested IICA on the WWW. The results of the experiments suggests that the ontology-based approach enables us intensive use of heterogeneous information resources on the wide-area networks such as the Internet. In Section 2, We describe ontology for information gathering, categorization and reorganization. In Section 3, We explain an information gathering method using ontologies and heuristics. In Section 4, we explain a new method of text categorization using ontologies. In Section 5, we describe how IICA uses heuristics based on expression patterns and phrases to extract and reorganization specific information from pages. In Section 6, we describe the evaluation of the above three methods. In Section 7, we discuss the advantages of our approach and summarize this paper.