Site Metadata on the Web

The navigation structure of Web sites can be regarded as metadata that can be used for interesting applications in User Interface (UI) design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), as well as for Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. However, there currently is no established format for site metadata, which makes it hard for Web sites to publish their structure in a machine-readable way, which could then be used by HCI and/or IR applications. We propose a model and a format for site metadata that is built on top of an existing format and thus could be deployed with little overhead by publishers as well as consumers. Making site metadata available as machine-readable data can be used for improving user interfaces (informing user agents about the context of the page they are displaying) and better information retrieval (allowing search engines to use sitemap information for better ranking and display of the results).