Modelling the Webspace of an Intranet

Searching the internet using the currently available search engines is not satisfactory. The techniques used there focus on the extraction of relevant information directly from the documents available on the web. We introduce a new approach, which aims at describing the content of a webspace, formed by a collection of related documents, instead of looking at the single documents. By identifying concepts and the relationships among them, the content of a webspace is described semantically in a schema for the webspace. The main objective is that by following this approach we can start querying the content of a collection of related documents rather than the content of a single document. In this paper we introduce a model for the webspace that allows us to describe the concepts at a semantical level, in terms of classes, associations over classes, and attributes of classes. At the syntactical level we use XML, to describe information as instantiations of the concepts defined in the webspace schema. Dealing with data on the web, implies dealing with semi-structured data. We discuss how this relates to our model for a webspace and show how to deal with these aspects efficiently when going towards an implementation. keywords: webspace-model, semi-structured, XML, concept-based search, Moa object algebra, organizing webspace.