Abstract

Web directories organize voluminous information into hierarchical structures, helping users to quickly locate relevant information and to support decision-making. The development of existing ontologies and Web directories either relies on expert participation that may not be available or uses automatic approaches that lack precision. As more users access the Web in their native languages, better approaches to organizing and developing non-English Web directories are needed. In this paper, we have proposed a semi-automatic framework, which consists of anchor directory boosting, meta-searching, and heuristic filtering, to construct domain-specific Web directories. Using the framework, we have built a Web directory in the Spanish business (SBiz) domain. Experimental results show that the SBiz Web directory achieved significantly better recall, F-value, efficiency, and satisfaction rating than the benchmark directory. Subjects provided favorable comments on the SBiz Web directory. This research thus contributes to developing a useful framework for organizing domain-specific information on the Web and to providing empirical findings and useful insights for end-users, system developers, and researchers of Web information seeking and knowledge management.

Keywords: Internet; Web; Browsing; Ontology; Business intelligence; Spanish; Non-English Web browsing; Knowledge management

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

2.1. Ontologies and their developments

2.2. Constructing Web directories

2.2.1. Manual categorization

2.2.2. Automated approaches to directory construction

2.3. Domain-specific Web resources: a review of Spanish Web search engines

3. Research gaps and questions

4. A semi-automatic framework

4.1. Anchor directory boosting

4.2. Meta-searching

4.3. Heuristic filtering

5. The Spanish business Web directory

5.1. Anchor directory boosting: identification and modification of category labels

5.2. Meta-searching: automatic generation of directory items

5.3. Heuristic filtering: verification and enhancement

6. Evaluation methodology

6.1. Experimental design and tasks

6.2. Hypothesis testing

6.3. Performance measure

7. Experimental results and discussions

7.1. Effectiveness of the Web directories

7.2. Efficiency of the Web directories

7.3. User ratings and comments on the Web directories

8. Conclusions and future directions

Acknowledgements

Appendix A. Appendix

Appendix B. Appendix

References