ONTOLOGY & CONTEXT/PERSPECTIVE – BASED WEB MINING USING
WORDNET DATABASE
Abstract
The World Wide Web today provides users
access to extremely large number of Web sites
many of which contain information of education
and commercial values. Technology in the field
of digital media generates huge amounts of
textual information. The potential for exchange
and retrieval of information is vast and
daunting. The key problem in achieving efficient
and user-friendly retrieval is the development of
a search mechanism to guarantee delivery of
minimal irrelevant information (high precision)
while insuring relevant information is not
overlooked (high recall). The traditional
solution employs keyword-based search. The
only documents retrieved are those containing
user specified keywords. But many documents
convey desired semantic information without
containing these keywords. The metrics used to
measure the quality of an ideal search result are
both accuracy and completeness.
The study investigates an approach,
Discovery, for using (1) context / perspective
information and (2) social networks such as
ODP or Wikipedia for designing practical and
scalable human-web systems for finding web
pages that are relevant and meet the needs and
requirements of a user or a group of users. The
resulting system arguably meets the common
needs and requirements of a group of people
based on the information provided by the group
in the form of a set of context web pages.
I. INTRODUCTION
The ubiquity of web can be characterized by
the enormous volume and coverage of web
content, the phenomenal number of web users
and businesses, the vast number of computers
and devices accessing web, and the large number
of web-based applications. Users today perform
more searches using web search engines than
OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) systems.
Web mining refers to the discovery of
knowledge from Web data that include Web pages,
media objects on the Web, Web links, Web log
data, and other data generated by the usage of Web
data.
Kosala and Blockeel classified Web mining
into:
(a) Web content mining
(b) Web structure mining and
(c) Web usage mining [3].
• Web content mining refers to mining
knowledge from Web pages and other Web
objects.
• Web structure mining refers to mining
knowledge about link structure connecting Web
pages and other Web objects.
• Webusage mining refers to the mining of usage
patterns of Web pages found among users
accessing a Website.
Among the three, Web content mining is perhaps
studied most extensively due to the prior work in
text mining. The traditional topics covered by Web
content mining include:
• Web page classification: This involves the
classification of Web pages under some pre-defined
categories that may be organised in a tree or other
structures.
• Web clustering: This involves the grouping of
Web pages based on the similarities among them.
Each resultant group should have similar Web
pages while Web pages from different resultant
groups should be dissimilar.
• Web extraction: This involves extracting HTML
elements, term phrases, or tuples from Web pages
that represent some required concept instances, e.g.,
person names, location names, book records, etc..
The ubiquity of web offers some obvious
explanations, namely:
• The coverage of web content is so large
that it is difficult for any traditional
digital library to match;
• The ability to browse web content
directly on the users’ computers and the
ease of downloading them is clearly a
big draw; and
• The availability of web search engines
(e.g. Google) and web directories (e.g.
Yahoo!, DMOZ) has helped
tremendously simplifying the process of
searching web content.
Nevertheless, web content is not always easy to
use. Due to the unstructured and semi-structured
nature of web pages and the design idiosyncrasy
of web sites, it is a challenging task to develop
digital libraries for organizing and managing
digital content from the web.
Berners-Lee et al. therefore introduced the idea
of semantic web which refers to the construction
of a machine-understandable semantic layer over
the existing web content so as to support better
information processing and web services. While
semantic web may take several years to realize,
digital library researchers are turning to web
mining techniques to improve the accessibility of
web content. The well established web mining
techniques include web classification and web
extraction.
II OBJECTIVES
Web mining techniques have shown promising
performance in research experiments.
Their actual deployment in live web
data, in contrast, has been fairly limited
due to the lack of background semantics
required for processing the text data,
links, and other elements in web pages.
In this respect, an ontology which gives a
conceptual description of the
background semantics can serve as a
very useful input to the Web mining
problems.
An Ontology refers to a set of concepts and the
relationships, together known as
ontology entities, describing the
information within an application
domain.
When an ontology is used in solving a web
classification or extraction problem, the
results obtained can be associated with
the ontology entities, making them
easier to understand. This is a big
advantage because each ontology often
represents knowledge agreed upon by
users and applications of a domain.
For the purpose of this paper, we define an
ontology to be a set of concepts C and relationships
R. The relationships in R can be either taxonomic or
non-taxonomic.
For example, Figure 1 depicts a simple University
ontology consisting of a set of concepts
Cuniv = {Person, Faculty, Staff, Student,
Department, Project, Course}, and a set of
relationships Runiv =
{Department_Of(Person, Department),
Member_Of(Person, Project),
Instructor_Of(Course, Person),
Superclass_Of(Faculty, Person),
Superclass_Of(Staff, Person),
Superclass_Of(Student, Person)}.
Superclass_Of represents the taxonomic
relationship while the rest are not.
With this definition, the instances of an ontology
refer to the instances of its concepts and
relationships. If each concept instance exists in the
form of a Web page, a relationship instance will
then exist in the form of a Web page pair. This
view has been adopted in most the Web
classification research.
On the other hand, if each concept instance exists in
3 the form an HTML element, a relationship
instance will then exist in the form of an HTML
element pair.
This alternative view is usually adopted in Web
extraction research. It is noted that other forms or
hybrid forms of concept instances may also exist
for some Websites.
As the languages for defining ontology and using
the latter in marking up web content become
well accepted. This paper describes the initiation
of a systematic design research study based on
prototyping / evaluation and abstraction using
existing and new techniques incorporated as plug
and play components into a research workbench.
The study investigates an approach called
DISCOVERY for using (1) context / perspective
information and (2) social networks such as ODP
or Wikipedia for designing practical and scalable
human-web systems for finding web pages that
are relevant and meet the needs and requirements
of a user or a group of users.
III. DISCOVERY APPROACH AND
ITS IMPLEMENTATION
3.1 Overview
A system based on the DISCOVERY approach
uses the following major subsystems:
a. Context/Perspective Extractor
b. Semantic Query Constructor
c. Results Categorizer/Visualizer
d. Context/Perspective Suggestion Agent (Profile
Builder)
3.1.1 Context/Perspective Extractor
This subsystem extracts context/perspective
details from the information provided by the user
(keywords, relevant URLs and documents). It is
highly likely that all the information provided by
the user for a specific query will be around a
single theme though we envision options for
building customized, personal indices of
searched pages. The challenge is to identify the
correct theme (perspective) and present it back
to the user in the shortest time possible. To help
identify the theme, ODP, as a human-edited
hierarchy of categories (ontology) with
descriptions, will be used. A number of
algorithms will be explored to improve the
theme(s) identification. One approach will be to
create a word-topic occurrence matrix and/or
phrase-topic matrix. By topic is meant one of the
ODP topic categories. The user-provided
URLs/documents can be matched against the
word / phrase-ODP topic matrices after Singular
Value Decomposition (SVD) by identifying the
cosine similarities.
3.1.2 Semantic Query Constructor
Semantic query construction is an important part
of the architecture for DISCOVERY. This
process will be used to disambiguate query terms
using WordNet (WordNet 2008). The industrial
ontology group in Finland –
http://www.cs.jyu.fi/ai/OntoGroup/InBCT_May
_2004. html – has done some significant study
about enhancing queries. WordNet’s hyponyms
can be used to provide a more generic
representation of the query. Enhanced queries
can also be constructed with the help of the most
common keywords and phrases in the context
information provided by the user and by using
the keywords/phrases representative of the
perspectives selected/provided by the user.
Query refinement with lexicons and ontologies
may beexplored using a methodology called
CONQUER (CONtext-aware QUERy
processing).
3.1.3 Results Categorizer/Visualizer
Clustering is an unsupervised learning process as
opposed to classification. Clustering the
documents against the perspectives selected by IV IMPLEMENTATION
the user is an interesting problem. Some The implementation of a system for
documents tend to be part of several perspectives DISCOVERY implements the first two
(which may show the interrelation between the subsystems – Context / Perspective Extractor and
perspectives). The main future research activity Semantic Query Constructor.
here is to identify the Best Matching Unit
(BMU) between the documents and between Figure 2: Details on the flow of events in the
documents and perspectives. Each perspective current implementation.
can be characterized with a set of
keywords/phrases and their respective calculated
distance to the retrieved results and presented to
the user.
This approach also paves the way to explore
certain hidden information, based on the user’s
discretion. Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) can be
used to cluster the result sets. The Kohonen
SOM network is very effective for visualization
of high dimensional data (Zhao and Ram 2004).
It compresses information while preserving the
most important topological and geometric
relationships of the primary data elements on the
display. Figure 2: Experimental Prototype – Flow of
Events
The main advantage is to gain insight into the
(hidden) structure of data by observing the map, 3.3 System Usage Scenarios
due to the topology preserving nature of SOM.
(Bakus et al. 2002) describe the use of phrases
The following scenarios provide a sample of the
for document clustering with SOM. (Amine et al.
ways a system implementing the DISCOVERY
2008) use SOM for concept based clustering of
approach might be used.
textual documents.
Scenario: A civil engineer interested to make a
3.1.4 Context/Perspective Suggestion Agent building design, and specifically in “Home,” can
(Profile Building) use the tool as follows :
A significant part of DISCOVERY is building
user-profiles by gathering perspective related • Context Profile: The user can input keyword
information over a period of time. The objective (“Home”) and/or related documents (e.g.
of this module (a type of recommender system) building construction URLs). Such related
is to learn and suggest perspectives for different documents act as the user-context.
types of topics.
• The system interacts with the user presenting a
One approach could be to use collaborative set of perspectives drawn from ODP topic
filtering algorithms to identify the user categories such as:
perspectives proactively (Das et al. 2007). Once
the system is put to use and data is gathered home, place: where you live at a particular
about user activities, further research can be time dwelling, home, domicile, abode,
conducted in this area of predicting user habitation, dwelling
interests. house: housing that someone is living in
home: the country or state or city where you the word form to look up.
live home: an environment offering affection */
and security home, nursing home, rest public static void main(String[] args)
home: an institution where people are cared {
for base, if (args.length > 0)
{
• Context/Perspective Selection: The user may // Concatenate the command-line arguments
choose among suggested perspectives and/or StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
may add his/her own perspective (e.g. “housing for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++)
that someone is living in”). {
buffer.append((i > 0 ? " " : "") + args[i]);
• The system disambiguates query terms using }
WordNet and then may semantically enhances String wordForm = buffer.toString();
the query using an ontology. // Get the synsets containing the word form
• The system executes the query and can WordNetDatabase database =
classify, filter, and cluster the results based on WordNetDatabase.getFileInstance();
the perspective(s) identified or suggested by the Synset[] synsets =
user. database.getSynsets(wordForm);
• Results Visualization: The user will // Display the word forms and definitions for
manipulate an easy-to navigate interface with synsets retrieved
which to identify the result density for a if (synsets.length > 0)
particular perspective and the distance between {
the perspectives. System.out.println("The following synsets
• User activities may be captured and recorded contain '" +
as part of an extended activity profile cover an wordForm + "' or a possible base form of that
extended period of time. text:");
for (int i = 0; i < synsets.length; i++)
3.4 Sample Java API using WordNet {
System.out.println("");
jawsTest.java
String[] wordForms =
package edu.smu.tspell.wordnet.impl.file.test;
synsets[i].getWordForms();
/**
for (int j = 0; j < wordForms.length; j++)
Displays word forms and definitions for synsets
{
containing the word form specified on the
System.out.print((j > 0 ? ", " : "") +
command line. To use this application, specify
wordForms[j]);
the word form that we wish to view synsets for,
}
as in the following example which displays all
System.out.println(": " +
synsets containing the word
synsets[i].getDefinition());
form "home":
}
<br>
}
java jawsTest home
else
*/
{
public class jawsTest
System.err.println("No synsets exist that contain
{
"+
/**
"the word form '" + wordForm + "'");
Main entry point. The command-line arguments
}
are
}
concatenated together (separated by spaces) and
else
used as
{
System.err.println("You must specify " +
"a word form for which to retrieve synsets.");
} D:\edu\smu\tspell\wordnet\impl\file\test
}
}
Output:
D:\edu\smu\tspell\wordnet\impl\file\test>java -
classpath .;C:/ mywork/code/jaws.jar -
Dwordnet.database.Dir = d:/WordNet/ 2.1/dict
jawsTest
Home
The following synsets contain 'home' or a
possible base form of that text:
home, place: where you live at a particular time
dwelling, home, domicile, abode, habitation,
dwelling
house: housing that someone is living in
home: the country or state or city where you live
home: an environment offering affection and
security
home, nursing home, rest
home: an institution where people are cared for
base,
home: the place where you are stationed and
from which missions start and end
family, household, house, home, menage: a
social unit living together
home plate, home base, home, plate: (baseball)
base
consisting of a rubber slab where the batter
stands; it
must be touched by a base runner in order to
score
home: place where something began and
flourished
home: provide with, or send to, a home
home: return home accurately from a long
distance
home: used of your own ground
home: relating to or being where one lives or
where one's roots are
home: at or to or in the direction of one's home
or family
home: on or to the point aimed at
home: to the fullest extent; to the heart
home, interior, internal, national: inside the
country
V. CONCLUSION
The work presented in this paper follows the
design science research paradigm regarding
Building research artifacts and evaluating the
same to test for feasibility, effectiveness, and
efficiency, and abstracting the knowledge gained
in terms of design principles and theories are
among the important research activities in design
science research. Start with a general approach,
DISCOVERY, and carry out its situated
implementation for carrying out explorations of
classes of web mining tasks. Experimentation
and evaluation of the resulting artifact aims to
find general design principles and mid-range
web mining theories.
The results reported in the paper point to the
potential of the DISCOVERY approach,
following design science methodology, to
advance knowledge. Future work will complete
the research study based on the DISCOVERY
approach. It will also develop a rigorous
experimental framework for evaluating a system
based on the approach (using WordNet as a
source of experimental data), and generalizing
the system.
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