An ontological crawling approach for improving information aggregation over eGovernment websites

Abstract

E-Government applications in developing countries are still lagging behind e-Governments in advanced countries. For example, the use of information integration for Web portal content is still very limited. This paper proposes an automated approach for information aggregation over e-Government portals using ontological approach. The study uses data obtained from 10 local government Websites in the Central Java province- Indonesia. The data in the form of HTML Web document text, meta-data, hyperlinks and other rich-contents are effectively crawled. This paper focuses on the development of a crawler, which consists of two main modules, i.e., multi-tread downloader and scheduler. The use of ontology in the focused crawler producesamore effective result as compared to the Breadth First Search (BFS) approach as it reaches 37% of effectiveness in terms of the number of relevant documents downloaded.