KMi Seminars
Search Engine-Crawler Symbiosis: Adapting to Community Interests
This event took place on Monday 15 December 2003 at 11:30

Dr Shannon Bradshaw

Web crawlers have been used for nearly a decade as a search engine component to create and update large collections of documents in order to serve the widely varying needs of web users. Typically the crawler and the rest of the search engine are not closely integrated, because the objective of the crawler is simply to gather as broad a sample of the Web as possible.

This approach to search engines while effective for simple information needs such as the take away menu for a local restaurant is less effective for searches requiring a range of documents in a focused topic space. Such information needs are regularly encountered in research and business.

In this talk I will present an approach to building search engines targeted to specific communities with shared focused interests. This work differs from previous approaches to focused crawling in that the focus of the system automatically changes as the needs and interests of its community evolve. Our approach is based on a tightly coupled system in which a crawler and a search engine engage in a symbiotic relationship. The crawler feeds the search engine and the search engine in turn helps the crawler to better its performance.

We show that symbiosis can help the system learn about a community's interests and serve that community's web search needs with better focus.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities