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
 

Narrative Hypermedia is...


Narrative Hypermedia
Narrative is concerned fundamentally with coherence, for instance, whether that be a fiction, an historical account or an argument, none of which 'make sense' unless they are put together in a coherent manner.

Hypermedia is the combination of hypertext for linking and structuring multimedia information.

Narrative Hypermedia is therefore concerned with how all of the above narrative forms, plus the many other diverse forms of discourse possible on the Web, can be effectively designed to communicate coherent conceptual structures, drawing inspiration from theories in narratology, semiotics, psycholinguistics and film.