CAREER/EPSCoR: Cooperative Agents for Conceptual Search and Browsing of World Wide Web Resources

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The goals of this project are four-fold: (1) to investigate ways to support distributed searching agents for the Web; (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of ontology-based Web browsing agents; (3) to study the use of of visualization agents for the Web; and (4) to keep a record of changes to the ontology to study how information changes on the Web. This approach has the following advantages: First, distributing the search process makes more equitable use of computing and network resources and allows search agents to be customized to reflect local interests and preferences. Second, an ontology-based browsing agent allows for more serendipitous access to Web resources. Unlike the current browsing structures (e.g., Yahoo), these browsing agents associate appropriate resources with each concept automatically. The ontology may adapt over time at individual sites, allowing the browsing structure to evolve as the Web itself evolves. Third, the ability to visualize large portions of the Web in a more abstract way allows users to quickly get an impression of what type of information is available. Fourth, by keeping a history of changes to the local ontologies, the ebb and flow of the importance of concepts locally and globally can be presented. Finally, undergraduate and graduate students are being exposed to a truly interdisciplinary research through their involvement in a long term project that combines expertise from several fields, primarily computer graphics, artificial intelligence, distributed processing and information science. The World Wide Web (WWW) offers the promise of unlimited access to electronic information. However currently, the reality is electronic access to unlimited anarchy. This project is addressing the use of conceptual ontologies to bring order to the chaos.