Semi-automatic Acquisition of Semantic Descriptions of Web Sites

Abstract

In order to obtain the desired information or functionality in the Web, a user often needs to perform multiple interactions with the Web site, e.g. submitting Web forms filled up with appropriate information, and the further execution of such a Web process depends on the information provided by the user in the previous steps of the process. The formal models underlying existing systems for supporting users in coping with the Web do not capture the dynamics and data flow of Web processes. As a result, searching for information in the so called "Deep Web" or desired business processes offered via the Web still requires significant manual effort. In this paper, we present a semantic process description language and present a mapping of the dynamics and data flow of Web sites to our semantic process description language. In order to allow development of more sophisticated methods and tools that consider the dynamics and data flow inside or among Web sites, significant number of descriptions of Web sites are needed. We approach this bootstrapping problem by presenting a technique for semi-automatic acquisition of semantic descriptions of Web Sites.