• What is web specific versus problems that are hard even on your computer

Use Case Title: A chain from the Web to the user

/Discussion

Purpose/Goals

To get information from the web to the user we have to use a chain of tools – typically web crawling, web data extraction, middleware transformation, user querying and delivering answer. There are several use cases dealing with particular problems of uncertainty along such a chain, e.g. Extraction-Annotation and User_prefference_modelling_for_top-k_answers. Usually there is a middleware connecting those.

The problem is, how does uncertainty evolve along such a chain.

Issues and Relevance to Uncertainty

In what follows we present issues and relevance to uncertainty which are specific for this use case and we annotate them (UncAnn) with reference to Uncertainty Ontology (UncertaintyOntology) and extensions to classes and properties described in Fine grained version of Uncertainty Ontology.

Our understanding of this is to view the whole chain of models, methods and tools from web to the user and especially handling uncertainty combination along this (UncAnn UncertaintyModel: CombinationOfSeveralModels). First experiments with such a chain are described in ''Web Search with variable user model''

First there is the Web. Only a few resources are annotated (tagged or made understandable to a computer). Some of them are structured in html tables (meaning less or difficult to understand). Many pages contain information in natural language and are designed for human consumption. This is typically difficult to understand for machines (UncAnn UncertaintyNature:Epistemic:MachineEpistemic).

When (at least a candidate) set of resources was allocated, we face a decision, download and what ?(a snippet or whole source code). Are there uncertainty problems in Wrappers, Crawlers, Search engines (see e.g. L. Galambos ''Egothor - Java search engine'')?

Some middleware between user and indexed resources has to care for matching and uncertainty too (see,e.g. ''Semantic Web Infrastructure using Data Pile'' and Data Integration Using Data Pile Structure'').

How to model users is another problem with many uncertainty problems, especially from the point of combination of different models, e.g. UncertaintyModel: Probability and UncertaintyModel: PreferenceModels. Considering the whole chain maybe can help us to understand different sorts of uncertainty in a context of an integrated Web application

Assumptions/Preconditions

• the above problem has many variants, depending on the type of web resource, type of user
• The problem depends also on size of data needed to process

Required Resources

1. Some already running examples where proprietary uncertainty representations can be helpful for understanding the whole problem
2. Human annotated examples, to verify training and experimenting new models

Successful End

Extend web standards in such a way that the whole chain from the Web to the user is covered by uncertainty application in a unified way and reusable

Failed End

• There will be only proprietary orchestrations of web services

Main Scenario

1. Solve problems of particular part of the chain
2. Try to integrate models, methods and tools

Existing software or other resources

in the following paper an experimental chain of tools is described (more focused on user side of chain)

P. Gurský, T. Horváth, J. Jirásek , S. Krajči, R. Novotný, V. Vaneková, P. Vojtáš, Knowledge Processing for Web Search – An Integrated Model, In: C. Badica and M. Paprzycki (eds.) Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Intelligent and Distributed Computing (IDC 2007), STUDIES IN COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE (vol. 78), Springer, 2007, pp: 95-104, see http://www.springer.com/engineering/book/978-3-540-74929-5

Additional background information or references

see also http://nazou.fiit.stuba.sk for more experiments on a chain of tools

Variations

Open Issues