Title: "A Framework for the Organization and Discovery of Information Resources in a WWW Environment Using Association, Classification and Deduction"

When: Monday, December 13, 2004 10:00am-12:00pm

Where: Room 503, ,IS Building

Who: Marut Buranarach

Committee:
Dr. Michael Spring, DIST (Committee Chair)
Dr. Stephen Hirtle, DIST
Dr. Ronald Larsen, DIST & DLIS
Dr. Vladimir Zadorozhny, DIST
Dr. Janyce Wiebe, Department of Computer Science

Abstract: The Semantic Web is envisioned as a next-generation WWW environment in which information is given well-defined meaning. Although the standards for the Semantic Web are being established, it is as yet unclear how the Semantic Web will allow information resources to be effectively organized and discovered in an automated fashion. This dissertation research explores the organization and discovery of resources for the Semantic Web. It speculates that resources on the Semantic Web will be retrieved based on metadata and ontologies that will provide an effective basis for automated deduction. An integrated deduction system based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) and description logic (DL) was elaborated. A case study was conducted to study the system effectiveness in retrieving resources in a large Web resource collection. Although the deduction impact has shown to improve overall retrieval performance over the defined queries, the results showed mixed performance over each individual query. The factors contributing to the degraded performance were identified and addressed. The sensitivity analysis was conducted over some properties of resources, subject categories, query expressions and relevance judgment in observing their relationships with the retrieval performance. The results highlight various issues and focus attention on potential problems that should be avoided. Some guidelines were developed based on the lessons learned from the case study for the deployment of Semantic Web data and systems.