Semantic Web Tools for Categorization Greek Texts on the Internet: the MeDa13 standard and TeGO ontology

The wider question of this study is the suitability of existing Web search engines for the needs of school education. It examines the relevance to the teaching objectives of the results returned by the search process given a query and its (stated or unstated) purpose in the context of an educational activity. The particular field of teaching and research interest is Modern Greek in Cypriot secondary education (third high school grade, G9). For the purpose of the research, the exploratory-descriptive and experimental approaches were adopted. The goal of this work is to automate the categorization of Greek texts available in the Internet into textual genres, according to their external (structural/format) and internal (linguistic, stylistic) features, using Semantic Web technology, i.e. metadata and ontologies. The long term vision is to build a semantic search engine that categorizes its results into textual genres as understood and used in high school teaching. The results so far highlighted the need for multi-categorization of texts, mainly due to their hybrid and multimodal nature. The contribution of this paper lies in the construction of a semantic search engine suitable for the needs of school education which returns results classified into textual genres, in accordance to their external and internal characteristics. An algorithm to categorize texts into genres was designed and tested on the basis of the standard metadata Dublin Core (DC). By adapting DC model to the needs of the present work, a model called ‘MeDa13’ (MetaData13) that includes thirteen elements, was designed. In addition, TeGO ontology (Textual Genres Ontology) was constructed in order to clarify concepts and terms that are stated in the definitions of textual genres. TeGO was developed specifically for teaching Modern Greek focusing on textual genres. In this paper, we describe the proposed models and present the target objectives and outcomes.