D7 – Dynamic Ontology Management System (Design) - STI Innsbruck

4.4 FUTURE WORK
D07_01_DOMS_F01
The work has concentrated on the implementation of the Internet agent and this report describes the
preliminary results obtained with our first prototype. The system is not fully implemented yet and
requires further work. We are currently modifying the Internet agents to:
• Improve their weight function calculation.
• At the moment the weight given to each web page is calculated by looking at which
properties are found in the page, the number of such properties, and their position on the
document. We want to improve this function by adding techniques used by other approaches
[Glover, 2002].
• Improve the response ontology.
• In this first prototype the response ontologies consist of a sorted list of web pages. The
response ontologies can be enhanced by providing values for each property found in every
web page.
Once the Internet agents are fully implemented, the Coordinator Agent must be completed to generate
the information ontology that merges and organises all the response ontologies, see Figure 11. This
process is not an easy task, as the retrieved information may be duplicated. As different Internet
agents may find and analyse related web pages, the Coordinator agent should use its knowledge of the
hierarchical relation between the ontology classes and decide if the information is redundant (and thus
remove the repeated information) or not (and keep the two related but complementing pieces of
information). The resulting information ontology will enhance the domain ontology by adding
knowledge extracted from the web pages by the MAS information search system.
The discovery of new concepts will be the next stage of the project. All the web pages can be
processed to discover new concepts that were omitted or unknown to the user. This concepts consist
of new classes, or properties of classes that are found in the retrieved pages but that the user did not
include in the domain ontology. Web mining tools can be used to build ontologies from HTML
documents. The resulting ontology can be compared with the domain ontology (the one created by
the user) to detect new classes or properties. Applicable techniques are employed to generate
databases with information retrieved from internet [Gramajo and Riaño, 2002].
IST-2001-33174 © h-TechSight Consortium October 2002 Page 22 of 27