Assessing Semantic Quality of Web Directory Structure

TL;DR

This paper proposes objective criteria for evaluating the structural quality of Web directories, integrating them into the Semantic Web vision using heuristics and ontologies.

Contribution

It introduces formal, objective measures for assessing Web directory structures, combining heuristic and ontology-based criteria.

Findings

Defined a set of evaluation criteria for Web directory quality

Demonstrated how to merge Web directories into the Semantic Web framework

Provided methods for objective assessment of directory structure balance

Abstract

The administration of a Web directory content and associated structure is a labor intensive task performed by human domain experts. Because of that there always exists a realistic risk of the structure becoming unbalanced, uneven and difficult to use to all except for a few users proficient in a particular Web directory. These problems emphasize the importance of generic and objective measures of Web directories structure quality. In this paper we demonstrate how to formally merge Web directories into the Semantic Web vision. We introduce a set of objective criterions for evaluation of a Web directory's structure quality. Some criteria functions are based on heuristics while others require the application of ontologies.