Triggering creativity through semantic cross-domain web crawling and routing

The paper outlines a method for searching Web documental resources useful to a VE and routing them to specific actors on the basis of: i) the relevance to the application domain(s) in the scope of a VE, ii) the coverage of a set of topics (domain concepts) related to a specific issue or actor's profile, iii) the possibility of enabling a collaboration among interested actors or triggering the analysis of the situation from a lateral view point, that is from a “path” of the conceptual structure supporting a person's thinking processes that is not strictly connected to the ones facing the issue. We propose a web crawler, based on an automatic ontology-based documents classifier, developed to explore (possibly huge amount of) Web pages, and identify a weighted set of concepts (Ontology-based Feature Vector - OFV) from the available domain ontologies that characterize the content of the document at best. In this way, annotated resources are semantically analyzed and matched with user profiles, to enable smart routing of knowledge fragments to VE participants.