Metadata-based modeling of information resources on the Web

This paper deals with the problem of modeling Web information resources using expert knowledge and personalized user information for improved Web searching capabilities. We propose a “Web information space” model, which is composed of Web-based information resources (HTML/XML [Hypertext Markup Language/Extensible Markup Language] documents on the Web), expert advice repositories (domain-expert-specified metadata for information resources), and personalized information about users (captured as user profiles that indicate users’ preferences about experts as well as users’ knowledge about topics). Expert advice, the heart of the Web information space model, is specified using topics and relationships among topics (called metalinks), along the lines of the recently proposed topic maps. Topics and metalinks constitute metadata that describe the contents of the underlying HTML/XML Web resources. The metadata specification process is semiautomated, and it exploits XML DTDs (Document Type Definition) to allow domain-expert guided mapping of DTD elements to topics and metalinks. The expert advice is stored in an object-relational database management system (DBMS). To demonstrate the practicality and usability of the proposed Web information space model, we created a prototype expert advice repository of more than one million topics/metalinks for DBLP (Database and Logic Programming) Bibliography data set. We also present a query interface that provides sophisticated querying facilities for DBLP Bibliography resources using the expert advice repository.