Ontology-Based Administration of Web Directories

TL;DR

This paper proposes an ontology-based framework for evaluating and automating the construction of Web directories, aiming to improve their structure quality and reduce manual maintenance efforts.

Contribution

It introduces formal criteria for Web directory quality assessment and an ontology-driven algorithm for automated directory structure development.

Findings

Ontology-based criteria effectively evaluate directory structure quality.

Automated algorithms can construct and rearrange Web directories using semantic descriptions.

Assessment feedback guides the ontology-based construction process.

Abstract

Administration of a Web directory and maintenance of its content and the associated structure is a delicate and labor intensive task performed exclusively by human domain experts. Subsequently there is an imminent risk of a directory structures becoming unbalanced, uneven and difficult to use to all except for a few users proficient with the particular Web directory and its domain. These problems emphasize the need to establish two important issues: i) generic and objective measures of Web directories structure quality, and ii) mechanism for fully automated development of a Web directory's structure. In this paper we demonstrate how to formally and fully integrate Web directories with the Semantic Web vision. We propose a set of criteria for evaluation of a Web directory's structure quality. Some criterion functions are based on heuristics while others require the application of ontologies. We also suggest an ontology-based algorithm for construction of Web directories. By using ontologies to describe the semantics of Web resources and Web directories' categories it is possible to define algorithms that can build or rearrange the structure of a Web directory. Assessment procedures can provide feedback and help steer the ontology-based construction process. The issues raised in the article can be equally applied to new and existing Web directories.