Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
With this scenario in mind, it is extremely desirable the possibility to retrieve
just relevant information.
In the next sections are presented several points of an on-going effort to de-
velop methods for extraction of relevant information from wikis in the form of re-
trieval tools. Next, it is presented the semantic approach that has been used, which
is based on an ontology and a classic retrieval model.
The ontology structure and content are discussed in the first main section of the
article. The second main section is concerned with the adopted retrieval algorithm.
Those two sections are followed by: the presentation of the effort to assess a de-
veloped software tool, the discussion of results, the presentation of related work,
and the presentation of conclusions.
2 The Semantic Approach
The Web has been a platform for the offer of information objects and information
services, including e-commerce systems. The amount of information resources,
because of their constant increase in amount and in size, represents a big challenge
for the retrieval of relevant information. Information is there to be processed by
humans, not by computers.
The Semantic Web (SW) was conceived by Berners-Lee and colleagues [3] to
overcome the information overload, in such a way that it should be possible that
resources of every type could be localized, retrieved and processed without human
intervention, using semantic descriptions amenable to be processed by software
agents [4].
Most of the Web sites present a clear separation between author and reader [5].
Authoring tools require special programming skills and, usually, are not collabora-
tive tools. In addition, it is extremely difficult to change or aggregate information
to already authored pages. One general solution is the wiki, a service that allows
readers change and create new pages in an orderly way, which permits controlled
collaboration.
Wikis are social media that can be used to exploit user satisfaction, exchange of
interests and experiences, and so on. Through them it is possible to do data mining
concerned to tendency information, product acceptability, among others. Without
some kind of semantics associated to the wiki content this data mining and even
simpler information retrieval is not an easy task.
Following it is briefly presented the concepts that were used to develop a tool
that retrieves information from wikis using ideas from the semantic Web. In addi-
tion, it is presented one chosen form to determine semantic similarity of docu-
ments, which is needed to retrieve general information.
2.1 The Semantic Web
Users basically have two ways to find the information for which they are inter-
ested in: they can browse or they can use a search engine [6]. Browse can be time
consuming and is prone to distractions. Search engines, based on keywords, usu-
ally retrieve large amounts of documents. Among those are irrelevant documents,
