Intelligent Assistance for Web Navigation

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1 Introduction

There can be no doubt that the Word Wide Web is growing at an incredible rate. The current default model for Web use is casual "surfing" - many users consider The Web a novelty and browse around without any specific goal. Clearly this model will change, if The Web is to survive, and tools will have to be available that support users who are searching for specific information.

This paper describes aspects of the Untangle Project, an effort to provide intelligent assistance to someone searching The Web for information. This assistance is manifested by several technologies which are briefly described in this paper.

The first technology is an ontology and knowledge-base implemented in the the description logic Classic [Brachman, et al., 1989], a descendant of KL-ONE. The ontology provides a deep representation of the information that is available on The Web.

The second technology is a web interface for Classic, which allows the knowledge-base to be accessed interactively through any web browser (such as netscape or mosaic). This access is not to a static set of HTML files that are generated automatically at periodic intervals, but to the live knowledge-base.

The paper closes with a discussion of how Untangle can be used as a vehicle to demonstrate the power and utility of KR in real applications.


Intelligent Assistance for Web Navigation - 18 OCT 95
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