Decision Support Systems in Ontology-Based Construction of Web Directories

The paper proposes a mechanism for fully automated development of a Web directory’ s structure using ontologies and the Semantic web as an underlying and integrating principle. Maintenance of a Web directory is a time and resource wise consuming task. Moreover, there is always a realistic risk of the structure becoming unbalanced, uneven and difficult to use to all except for a few users proficient in a particular Web directory. By using ontologies to describe semantics of Web resources and Web directory’ s categories, and through the use of ontology matching, it is possible to construct algorithms that can build or rearrange the structure of a Web directory. Such applications are immediately helpful but also can be useful in the more general problem of ontology sorting.