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refinement. Someone thinks that search engine
should be considered “only a primitive form of
decision support” (Spivack, 2010). So, the vision of
a Web where search engines are able to provide
results without direct questions from users,
anticipating their needs, could be now plausible. A
Web in service of the user, automatically informed
by the system with suggested resources related with
his life style and his common behaviour without the
need to ask for them.
In this paper we illustrate a section of a project
named A Semantic Search Engine for a Business
Network where some of the ideas previously
described are applied. It involves the development of
a business network able to create a point of contact
between the academic and research world in general
and the productive one, with the aim of encourage
the cooperation and the sharing of ideas, of different
point of views, information material or needs, and in
order to support the productive world and decision-
making connected with it.
The infrastructure will be designed as a
distributed architecture, with regard to information
and existing content and by the development of tools
thought in order to put users into the center of
information, giving them a privileged window of
observation on information and knowledge applied
to a specific application field.
The remainder of the paper is organized as
follows: Section 2 describes the project in a general
way, while Section 3 discusses in a detailed way the
above questions. Finally, Section 4 draws
conclusions.
2 GOALS OF THE PROJECT
In order to focus better on purposes and objectives
of the project, some considerations are required.
Web is changing. The way to access the
information is not the same of some years ago.
Social networks, blogs, RSS and new features in
search engines are all news in the ICT context if
compared with some years ago. The trend,
hopefully, is the definition of new tools developed in
order to follow the user in his activity and support
him with the automatic generation and delivery of
contents without his explicit request and according
to his interest. The Web depending on user needs
and interests. Not more a single available and shared
space of information for everyone, but a specific
private space of information available according to
the user point of view, his way to organize, classify
and manage information, related to his network of
contacts in the way each person choose to live the
Web, Internet and the knowledge. Currently, the
management of information is a key question in the
Web.
The automatic categorization of information
through a predefined taxonomy, organized in a
hierarchical category system, is often a restrictive
and forced path. The same resource could be
classified in different way from different people and
the same user could place the same page under
different categories according to the reading context
or to the content he is interested in. The
classification of a document is, as well, depending
by the personal culture, experience and context of
life. Moreover, documents are often realized using
heterogeneous contents, talk about several topics and
are obviously related to several categories.
Otherwise, with the Web 2.0, folksonomy, social
tagging and social bookmarking place the user as
start point in a categorization work where each user
labels resource. This step moves from a hierarchical
logic to a more simpler way where all tags are at the
same level.
Passing from the user management of
information to an automatic one, a classification
system should be able to categorize information
according to user preferences and to relate his
classification to a common set of categories based
on a predefined taxonomy.
By means of a such categorization tool, each user
manages in a personal way his bookmarks, accedes
to a quantity of Web sites, about scientific, news,
entertainment or other topics, selecting, choosing
and categorizing through the system. The system is
able to manage a flow of information coming from a
big set of predefined channels and updatable
depending on the user preferences. Channels should
be social networks, blogs, RSS services, news
services, Web sites and search engines too, selected
by the user. The system categorizes information
from these channels delivering contents that meet
user preferences by means of a match algorithm
based on user profile and document classification.
The user can see categories associated to each
resource labelled and ordered according his schema.
The vision of the Web and of search engines, as
described below, is applied to a project in starting
phase and will converge in a system able to support
and follow users in their activities. In particular the
idea behind the project is the realization of a
business network able to guarantee the match and
the cooperation of academic and research world
with the productive one in order to sustain related
production and decisional processes.
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