Building Web Navigation Agents Using Domain-Specific Ontologies

Abstract

This paper proposes a method of constructing navigation agents that provide more personalized Web navigation by exploiting domain-specific ontologies. In general, ontology is regarded as the specification of conceptualization that enables formal definitions about things and states by using terms and relationships between them. In our approach, Web pages are converted into concepts by referring to domain-specific ontologies which employ a hierarchical concept structure. This concept mapping makes it easy to handle Web pages, and also provides higher level classification information. The proposed navigation agent eventually recommends the Web documents that are associated with the concept nodes in the upper-levels of the hierarchy by analyzing the current Web page and its outwardly-linked pages.