AreaView2001: A system of presenting structured area knowledge extracted from WWW

Abstract

Information on the World Wide Web(WWW) is increasing day by day because of its open characteristics. It becomes difficult for users to find useful information in this huge WWW information space. Even if a user can fortunately find useful pages, it is difficult for him/her to acquire all the aspects or a structured knowledge view regarding his/her query. In this paper, we describe a system called "AreaView2001", which presents an overall structured view of the queried area together with a set of useful Web pages explaining the area and its subareas. The style of the presentation is similar to book style, consisiting of chapters and sections. When extracting important keywords of the area from collected Web pages, the system employs the method of KeyGraph which can extract keywords of the main topics and underlying basis knowledge of a text document. AreaView2001 is particularly useful for those users that want to know unfamiliar areas, such as academic areas, since the area knowledge available in the WWW will be presented as a collection of useful Web pages sorted out according to the overall structure of the area. Although the area knowledge to be presented by the system is not so well structured as book chapters because of the full-automatic structuring, it can provide a variety of vivid knowledge not available in books. Some experimental evaluations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the sysytem.