Classifying Web Data in Directory Structures

Web Directories have emerged as an alternative to the Search Engines for locating information on the Web. Typically, Web Directories rely on humans putting in significant time and effort into finding important pages on the Web and categorizing them in the Directory. In this paper, we experimentally study the automatic population of a Web Directory via the use of a subject hierarchy. For our study, we have constructed a subject hierarchy for the top level topics offered in Dmoz, by leveraging ontological content from available lexical resources. We first describe how we built our subject hierarchy. Then, we analytically present how the hierarchy can help in the construction of a Directory. We also introduce a ranking formula for sorting the pages listed in every Directory topic, based on the pages' quality, and we experimentally study the efficiency of our approach against other popular methods for creating Directories.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: APWEB
• Authors: Sofia Stamou, Alexandros Ntoulas, Vlassis Krikos, Pavlos Kokosis, Dimitris Christodoulakis
• Keywords: APWEB 2006, Available Lexical Resources, Internet Technology, Subject Hierarchy, Web Directories