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When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination http://eprints.soton.ac.uk SEMANTIC LINKING AND PERSONALIZATION IN CONTEXT Melike Şah A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. June, 2009 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ENGINEERING SCHOOL OF ELECTRONICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Doctor of Philosophy SEMANTIC LINKING AND PERSONALIZATION IN CONTEXT by Melike Şah The World Wide Web (WWW) is intended for humans to create and share documents. However, it does not support machine-processable data and automated processing. The Semantic Web is an extension to the WWW and can overcome its shortcomings. The Semantic Web provides the technology for creating and sharing data in machine- processable semantics. As a result, the data can be used and shared in effective ways between cross applications. In this thesis, we investigate the Semantic Web technologies for context-based hyperlink creation and personalization. Two different contributions are presented using Semantic Web technologies. First, we introduce and implement a novel personalized Semantic Web-enabled portal (known as a semantic portal), which is called SEMPort with the aim of improving information discovery and information sharing using the Semantic Web technologies. We also provide different Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) methods using ontology-based user models. In our second contribution, we introduce and implement a novel personalized Semantic Web browser, called SemWeB which is a browser that augments Web documents with metadata. It creates and personalizes context-based hyperlinks and data using ontologies. We have also developed a new behaviour-based user model for Web-based personalization which supports different AH methods. In addition, a novel semantic relatedness measure is proposed. The evaluations showed that our contributions to the development of hypertext systems using Semantic Web technologies are successfully applied for context-based link creation and personalization. ii Contents 1 Introduction......................................................................................... 1 1.1 Motivation...................................................................................................... 2 1.1.1 Semantic Portals.................................................................................3 1.1.2 Semantic Web Browsers.................................................................... 4 1.2 Significance of the Research.......................................................................... 5 1.3 Research Hypotheses ..................................................................................... 6 1.4 Research Scope.............................................................................................. 6 1.5 Contributions ................................................................................................. 7 1.5.1 Building and Managing Personalized Semantic Portals .................... 7 1.5.2 Designing a Personalized Semantic Web Browser............................ 8 1.6 Thesis Structure............................................................................................. 9 1.7 Declaration................................................................................................... 10 2 Hypertext ........................................................................................... 11 2.1 A Short History of Hypertext....................................................................... 11 2.2 The World Wide Web and Hypertext .......................................................... 14 2.2.1 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) 15 2.2.2 Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)............................................... 16 2.2.3 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) ............................................ 16 2.2.4 Web Browsers.................................................................................. 16 2.3 Discussion of Hypertext............................................................................... 17 2.4 Chapter Summary........................................................................................ 17 3 The Semantic Web............................................................................ 19 3.1 The Semantic Web Technologies and Standards......................................... 20 3.1.1 Unicode and Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) ............................ 21 3.1.2 Extensible Markup Language (XML).............................................. 21 3.1.3 Resource Description Framework (RDF) ........................................ 21 3.1.4 RDF Schema (RDFS) ...................................................................... 23 3.1.5 Web Ontology Language (OWL) .................................................... 23 3.1.6 Rules Layer: Rule Interchange Format (RIF) .................................. 24 3.1.7 SPARQL Query Language for RDF................................................ 24 iii 3.1.8 Logic Layer and Inference............................................................... 25 3.1.9 Proof Layer...................................................................................... 26 3.1.10 Trust Layer....................................................................................... 26 3.1.11 User Interface and Applications....................................................... 26 3.2 Semantic Web as a Web of Linked Data ..................................................... 26 3.2.1 Basic Principles of Linked Data ...................................................... 28 3.2.2 URI Dereferencing........................................................................... 29 3.2.3 Examples of Ontologies and Vocabularies for Publishing Linked Data 30 3.2.4 Serving Linked Data ........................................................................ 30 3.3 Chapter Summary........................................................................................ 31 4 Adaptive Hypermedia....................................................................... 32 4.1 Adaptation Mechanisms .............................................................................. 32 4.1.1 User Characteristics......................................................................... 33 4.1.2 User’s Individual Traits ................................................................... 34 4.1.3 Environmental Data......................................................................... 34 4.2 Adaptive Hypermedia Methods and Techniques......................................... 34 4.2.1 Adaptive Presentation...................................................................... 35 4.2.2 Adaptive Navigation Support .......................................................... 35 4.3 Application Areas of Adaptive Hypermedia................................................ 36 4.4 Pre-Web Adaptive Hypermedia................................................................... 37 4.5 Web-Based Adaptive Hypermedia .............................................................. 37 4.6 Semantic Web-Based Adaptive Hypermedia............................................... 39 4.6.1 AH and Metadata ............................................................................. 40 4.7 Discussion.................................................................................................... 42 4.8 Chapter Summary........................................................................................ 43 5 Related Work .................................................................................... 44 5.1 Semantic Portals...........................................................................................44 5.1.1 What is a Web Portal?...................................................................... 44 5.1.2 What is a Semantic Portal? .............................................................. 45 5.1.3 State-of-the-Art Semantic Portals.................................................... 45 5.1.4 Discussion of Semantic Portals........................................................ 51 5.2 Semantic Web Browsers.............................................................................. 51 5.2.1 What is a Semantic Web Browser?.................................................. 52 iv 5.2.2 Related Research in Semantic Web Browsers................................. 52 5.2.3 Discussion of Semantic Web Browsers ........................................... 57 5.3 Semantic Annotation.................................................................................... 58 5.3.1 What is Information Extraction (IE)? .............................................. 58 5.3.2 What is Annotation?