Fine Grained Approach for Domain Specific Seed URL Extraction

Domain Specific Search Engines are expected to provide relevant search results. Availability of enormous number of URLs across subdomains improves relevance of domain specific search engines. The current methods for seed URLs can be systematic ensuring representation of subdomains. We propose a fine grained approach for automatic extraction of seed URLs at subdomain level using Wikipedia and Twitter as repositories. A SeedRel metric and a Diversity Index for seed URL relevance are proposed to measure subdomain coverage. We implemented our approach for \u27Security - Information and Cyber\u27 domain and identified 34,007 Seed URLs and 400,726 URLs across subdomains. The measured Diversity index value of 2.10 conforms that all subdomains are represented, hence, a relevant \u27Security Search Engine\u27 can be built. Our approach also extracted more URLs (seed and child) as compared to existing approaches for URL extraction

An Improved Focused Crawler: Using Web Page Classification and Link Priority Evaluation

A focused crawler is topic-specific and aims selectively to collect web pages that are relevant to a given topic from the Internet. However, the performance of the current focused crawling can easily suffer the impact of the environments of web pages and multiple topic web pages. In the crawling process, a highly relevant region may be ignored owing to the low overall relevance of that page, and anchor text or link-context may misguide crawlers. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a new focused crawler. First, we build a web page classifier based on improved term weighting approach (ITFIDF), in order to gain highly relevant web pages. In addition, this paper introduces an evaluation approach of the link, link priority evaluation (LPE), which combines web page content block partition algorithm and the strategy of joint feature evaluation (JFE), to better judge the relevance between URLs on the web page and the given topic. The experimental results demonstrate that the classifier using ITFIDF outperforms TFIDF, and our focused crawler is superior to other focused crawlers based on breadth-first, best-first, anchor text only, link-context only, and content block partition in terms of harvest rate and target recall. In conclusion, our methods are significant and effective for focused crawler

Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives

The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general

Automated retrieval and extraction of training course information from unstructured web pages

Web Information Extraction (WIE) is the discipline dealing with the discovery, processing and extraction of specific pieces of information from semi-structured or unstructured web pages. The World Wide Web comprises billions of web pages and there is much need for systems that will locate, extract and integrate the acquired knowledge into organisations practices. There are some commercial, automated web extraction software packages, however their success comes from heavily involving their users in the process of finding the relevant web pages, preparing the system to recognise items of interest on these pages and manually dealing with the evaluation and storage of the extracted results. This research has explored WIE, specifically with regard to the automation of the extraction and validation of online training information. The work also includes research and development in the area of automated Web Information Retrieval (WIR), more specifically in Web Searching (or Crawling) and Web Classification. Different technologies were considered, however after much consideration, Naïve Bayes Networks were chosen as the most suitable for the development of the classification system. The extraction part of the system used Genetic Programming (GP) for the generation of web extraction solutions. Specifically, GP was used to evolve Regular Expressions, which were then used to extract specific training course information from the web such as: course names, prices, dates and locations. The experimental results indicate that all three aspects of this research perform very well, with the Web Crawler outperforming existing crawling systems, the Web Classifier performing with an accuracy of over 95% and a precision of over 98%, and the Web Extractor achieving an accuracy of over 94% for the extraction of course titles and an accuracy of just under 67% for the extraction of other course attributes such as dates, prices and locations. Furthermore, the overall work is of great significance to the sponsoring company, as it simplifies and improves the existing time-consuming, labour-intensive and error-prone manual techniques, as will be discussed in this thesis. The prototype developed in this research works in the background and requires very little, often no, human assistance

The Corpus Expansion Toolkit: finding what we want on the web

This thesis presents the Corpus Expansion Toolkit (CET), a generally applicable toolkit that allows researchers to build domain-specific corpora from the web. The main purpose of the work presented in this thesis and the development of the CET is to provide a solution to discovering desired content on the web from possibly unknown locations or a poorly defined domain. Using an iterative process, the CET is able to solve the problem of discovering domain-specific online content and expand a corpus using only a very small number of example documents or characteristic phrases taken from the target domain. Using a human-in-the-loop strategy and a chain of discrete software components the CET also allows the concept of a domain to be iteratively defined using the very online resources used to expand the original corpus. The CET combines feature extraction, search, web crawling and machine learning methods to collected, store, filter and perform information extraction on collected documents. Using a small number of example ‘seed’ documents the CET is able to expand the original corpus by finding more relevant documents from the web and provide a number of tools to support their analysis. This thesis presents a case study-based methodology that introduces the various contributions and components of the CET through the discussion of five case studies covering a wide variety of domains and requirements that the CET has been applied. These case studies hope to illustrate three main use cases, listed below, where the CET is applicable: 1. Domain known – source known 2. Domain known – source unknown 3. Domain unknown – source unknown First, use cases where the sites for document collection are known and the topic of research is clearly defined. Second, instances where the topic of research is clearly defined but where to find relevant documents on the web is unknown. Third, the most extreme use case, where the domain is poorly defined or unknown to the researcher and the location of the information is also unknown. This thesis presents a solution that allows researchers to begin with very little information on a specific topic and iteratively build a clear conception of a domain and translate that to a computational system

A customized semantic service retrieval methodology for the digital ecosystems environment

With the emergence of the Web and its pervasive intrusion on individuals, organizations, businesses etc., people now realize that they are living in a digital environment analogous to the ecological ecosystem. Consequently, no individual or organization can ignore the huge impact of the Web on social well-being, growth and prosperity, or the changes that it has brought about to the world economy, transforming it from a self-contained, isolated, and static environment to an open, connected, dynamic environment. Recently, the European Union initiated a research vision in relation to this ubiquitous digital environment, known as Digital (Business) Ecosystems. In the Digital Ecosystems environment, there exist ubiquitous and heterogeneous species, and ubiquitous, heterogeneous, context-dependent and dynamic services provided or requested by species. Nevertheless, existing commercial search engines lack sufficient semantic supports, which cannot be employed to disambiguate user queries and cannot provide trustworthy and reliable service retrieval. Furthermore, current semantic service retrieval research focuses on service retrieval in the Web service field, which cannot provide requested service retrieval functions that take into account the features of Digital Ecosystem services. Hence, in this thesis, we propose a customized semantic service retrieval methodology, enabling trustworthy and reliable service retrieval in the Digital Ecosystems environment, by considering the heterogeneous, context-dependent and dynamic nature of services and the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of service providers and service requesters in Digital Ecosystems.The customized semantic service retrieval methodology comprises: 1) a service information discovery, annotation and classification methodology; 2) a service retrieval methodology; 3) a service concept recommendation methodology; 4) a quality of service (QoS) evaluation and service ranking methodology; and 5) a service domain knowledge updating, and service-provider-based Service Description Entity (SDE) metadata publishing, maintenance and classification methodology.The service information discovery, annotation and classification methodology is designed for discovering ubiquitous service information from the Web, annotating the discovered service information with ontology mark-up languages, and classifying the annotated service information by means of specific service domain knowledge, taking into account the heterogeneous and context-dependent nature of Digital Ecosystem services and the heterogeneous nature of service providers. The methodology is realized by the prototype of a Semantic Crawler, the aim of which is to discover service advertisements and service provider profiles from webpages, and annotating the information with service domain ontologies.The service retrieval methodology enables service requesters to precisely retrieve the annotated service information, taking into account the heterogeneous nature of Digital Ecosystem service requesters. The methodology is presented by the prototype of a Service Search Engine. Since service requesters can be divided according to the group which has relevant knowledge with regard to their service requests, and the group which does not have relevant knowledge with regard to their service requests, we respectively provide two different service retrieval modules. The module for the first group enables service requesters to directly retrieve service information by querying its attributes. The module for the second group enables service requesters to interact with the search engine to denote their queries by means of service domain knowledge, and then retrieve service information based on the denoted queries.The service concept recommendation methodology concerns the issue of incomplete or incorrect queries. The methodology enables the search engine to recommend relevant concepts to service requesters, once they find that the service concepts eventually selected cannot be used to denote their service requests. We premise that there is some extent of overlap between the selected concepts and the concepts denoting service requests, as a result of the impact of service requesters’ understandings of service requests on the selected concepts by a series of human-computer interactions. Therefore, a semantic similarity model is designed that seeks semantically similar concepts based on selected concepts.The QoS evaluation and service ranking methodology is proposed to allow service requesters to evaluate the trustworthiness of a service advertisement and rank retrieved service advertisements based on their QoS values, taking into account the contextdependent nature of services in Digital Ecosystems. The core of this methodology is an extended CCCI (Correlation of Interaction, Correlation of Criterion, Clarity of Criterion, and Importance of Criterion) metrics, which allows a service requester to evaluate the performance of a service provider in a service transaction based on QoS evaluation criteria in a specific service domain. The evaluation result is then incorporated with the previous results to produce the eventual QoS value of the service advertisement in a service domain. Service requesters can rank service advertisements by considering their QoS values under each criterion in a service domain.The methodology for service domain knowledge updating, service-provider-based SDE metadata publishing, maintenance, and classification is initiated to allow: 1) knowledge users to update service domain ontologies employed in the service retrieval methodology, taking into account the dynamic nature of services in Digital Ecosystems; and 2) service providers to update their service profiles and manually annotate their published service advertisements by means of service domain knowledge, taking into account the dynamic nature of service providers in Digital Ecosystems. The methodology for service domain knowledge updating is realized by a voting system for any proposals for changes in service domain knowledge, and by assigning different weights to the votes of domain experts and normal users.In order to validate the customized semantic service retrieval methodology, we build a prototype – a Customized Semantic Service Search Engine. Based on the prototype, we test the mathematical algorithms involved in the methodology by a simulation approach and validate the proposed functions of the methodology by a functional testing approach

Intelligent Web Crawling using Semantic Signatures

The quantity of test that is added to the web in the digital form continues to grow and the quest for tools that can process this huge amount of data to retrieve the data of our interest is an ongoing process. Moreover, observing these large volumes of data over a period of time is a tedious task for any human being. Text mining is very helpful in performing these kinds of tasks. Text mining is a process of observing patterns in the text data using sophisticated statistical measures both quantitatively and qualitatively. Using these text mining techniques and the power of the internet and its technologies, we have developed a tool that retrieves documents concerning topics of interest, which utilizes novel and sensitive classification tools.;This thesis presents an intelligent web crawler, named Intel-Crawl. This tool identifies web pages of interest without the user\u27s guidance or monitoring. Documents of interest are logged (by URL or file name). This package uses automatically generated semantic signatures to identify documents with content of interest. The tool also produces a vector that is a quantification of a document\u27s content based on the semantic signatures. This provides a rich and sensitive characterization of the document\u27s content. Documents are classified according to content and presented to the user for further analysis and investigation.;Intel-Crawl may be applied to any area of interest. It is likely to be very useful in areas such as law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and monitoring changes in web site contents over time. It is well-suited for scrutinizing the web activity of large collection of web pages pertaining to similar content. The utility of Intel-Crawl is demonstrated in various situations using different parameters and classification techniques

Improving the Reliability of Web Search Results

Over the last years, it has been possible to observe the exponential growth of the internet. Everyday new websites are created. Everyday new technologies are developed. Everyday new data is added into the web. The search for available online data on the web has become an increasingly common practice to any person because, the regular user wants to know more. For any existing question or doubt, the user wants the answer the fastest way possible. It is in this field where the search engines are an exceptional tool in helping their users. In order to aid the users reach for what they were seeking for, search engines have become a fantastic tool. Either it is searched for a certain website, some specific information or even for the seek of knowledge, search engines help the user reach his goal. Without their existence, it would be much more difficult and frustrating to find the needed information, which would lead to a tremendous loss of time and resources, and most of the cases, the user would probably not reach the results it was looking for. Thus, the development of web search engines provided a better comfort for the user. However, despite the fact there is a really effective tool, sometimes it can lead to unintended results. Towards a search, the search engine can lead to a suggestion of a website that does not correspond to the expectation of the user. This is due to the fact that search engines only show part of the content related with each correspondent hyperlink, which for several times, users think the answer for what they are looking for is in some website and when they start analysing it, the intended information is not there. Entering and leaving different websites, can be a big inconvenience, even more if the internet connection is slow (as it can happen outside the big cities or in least developed areas), which makes the user lose more time and patience. This dissertation intends to explore the possibility and prove the concept that, with the help and junction of different technologies such as parsing, web crawling, web mining and semantic web in a machine, it is possible to improve the reliability from the search engines, in order for the user lose the minimal time or resources possible