Details of Research Outputs

It is common for Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo to use keyword searching. Keyword searching employs techniques such as frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) [21] to determine the importance of a word in a document. These methods have several problems. Firstly, keyword searches locate web pages using the input keywords, without reference to semantics. The use of semantic information, perhaps in conjunction with frequency-based search methods, can be expected to produce meaning-based searches more relevant to users' meaning-driven queries. Meaning-based or semantic searches cannot be conducted without semantically oriented technologies. One such technology which may facilitate semantic searches is the Semantic Web [2]. The Semantic Web has received substantial attention from the research community recently. The Semantic Web -the next generationWorld Wide Web -aims to provide a new framework that can enable knowledge sharing and reuse. The SemanticWeb uses agent technology, ontology, and a number of standard markup languages such as RDF, OWL and RDFS to formally model information represented in web resources. This makes it accessible to humans and computers working together, perhaps in conjunction with intelligent network services such as search agents. Related to the development of the Semantic Web, new research findings have been forthcoming in areas such as Knowledge Engineering, ontology-based Information Retrieval and ontology-based agents. The rest of this Chapter is organized as follows. In Sect. 2, we provide an overview of the Semantic Web. In Sect. 3, we review some related work involving the Semantic Web and guidance systems. In Sect. 4, we describe the ontology-based tourist guidance system, including details of how we modeled the travel ontology, as well as the iJADE FreeWalker system architecture. Sect. 5 presents experimental results, while Sect. 6 rounds off with conclusions and suggested avenues for future research. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.