Modelling the webspace of an intranet.pdfVIP

Modelling the webspace of an intranet Roelof van Zwol and Peter M.G. Apers University of Twente Department of Computer Science P.O.box 217, 7500 AE, the Netherlands {zwol, apers}@cs.utwente.nl Abstract Searching the internet using the currently available search engines is not satisfactory. The techniques used there focus on the extraction of relevant information directly from the docu- ments available on the web. We introduce a new approach, which aims at describing the content of a webspace, formed by a collection of related documents, instead of looking at the single doc- uments. By identifying concepts and the relationships among them, the content of a webspace is described semantically in a schema for the webspace. The main objective is that by following this approach we can start querying the content of a collection of related documents rather than the content of a single document. In this paper we introduce a model for the webspace that allows us to describe the concepts at a semantical level, in terms of classes, associations over classes, and attributes of classes. At the syntactical level we use XML, to describe information as instantiations of the concepts defined in the webspace schema. Dealing with data on the web, implies dealing with semi-structured data. We discuss how this relates to our model for a webspace and show how to deal with these aspects efficiently when going towards an implementation. keywords: webspace-model, semi-structured, XML, concept-based search, Moa object alge- bra, organizing webspace. 1 Introduction Large collections of electronic data are made available via the web. Most of the time the format of this data does no