An ontology-based web crawling approach for the retrieval of materials in the educational domain

As the web continues to be a huge source of information for various domains, the information available is rapidly increasing. Most of this information is stored in unstructured databases and therefore searching for relevant information becomes a complex task and the search for pertinent information within a specific domain is time-consuming and, in all probability, results in irrelevant information being retrieved. Crawling and downloading pages that are related to the user’s enquiries alone is a tedious activity. In particular, crawlers focus on converting unstructured data and sorting this into a structured database. In this paper, among others kind of crawling, we focus on those techniques that extract the content of a web page based on the relations of ontology concepts. Ontology is a promising technique by which to access and crawl only related data within specific web pages or a domain. The methodology proposed is a Web Crawler approach based on Ontology (WCO) which defines several relevance computation strategies with increased efficiency thereby reducing the number of extracted items in addition to the crawling time. It seeks to select and search out web pages in the education domain that matches the user’s requirements. In WCO, data is structured based on the hierarchical relationship, the concepts which
are adapted in the ontology domain. The approach is flexible for application to crawler items for different domains by adapting user requirements in defining several relevance computation strategies with promising results.