Adaptive Ontology-based Web Information Retrieval: The TARGET Framework

Finding relevant information on the Web is difficult for most users. Although Web search applications are improving, they must be more 'intelligent' to adapt to the search domains targeted by queries, the evolution of these domains, and users' characteristics. In this paper, the authors present the TARGET framework for Web Information Retrieval. The proposed approach relies on the use of ontologies of a particular nature, called adaptive ontologies, for representing both the search domain and a user's profile. Unlike existing approaches on ontologies, the authors make adaptive ontologies adapt semi-automatically to the evolution of the modeled domain. The ontologies and their properties are exploited for domain specific Web search purposes. The authors propose graph-based data structures for enriching Web data in semantics, as well as define an automatic query expansion technique to adapt a query to users' real needs. The enriched query is evaluated on the previously defined graph-based data structures representing a set of Web pages returned by a usual search engine in order to extract the most relevant information according to user needs. The overall TARGET framework is formalized using first-order logic and fully tool supported.