LearnMiner: deductive, tolerant agents for discovering didactic resources on the web

ABSTRACT

As information nowadays represents a key factor in every successful business, and Internet offers literally tons of available data concerning almost every area of human activity, there emerges a real necessity for good search tools that can obtain high quality information in a short time. Nowadays finding useful information can be an overwhelming task. As a result, consumers need effective mechanisms for searching the Web. This paper describes LearnMiner, an open, agent-based platform designed for advanced didactic resource discovery. A central role is played by deductive agents, equipped with a similarity-based inference mechanism. This issue enables to bridge the gap between the requested information and the available information on the net, considering the "similarity" as a weaker relation for undiscernibility.

REFERENCES

• 1: Krzysztof R. Apt, Logic programming, Handbook of theoretical computer science (vol. B): formal models and semantics, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991
• 2: Ferrante Formato , Giangiacomo Gerla , Maria I. Sessa, Similarity-based unification, Fundamenta Informaticae, v.41 n.4, p.393-414, March 2000
• 3: Gallaire H., Nicolas J. M. Database: Theory vs. interpretation. In H. Gallaire and J. M. Eds., editors, Logic and Database, pages 33-54. Plenum Press, 1978.
• 4: Eric J. Glover , Steve Lawrence , William P. Birmingham , C. Lee Giles, Architecture of a metasearch engine that supports user information needs, Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Information and knowledge management, p.210-216, November 02-06, 1999, Kansas City, Missouri, United States [doi>10.1145/319950.319980]
• 5: Eric J. Glover , Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis , Steve Lawrence , David M. Pennock , Gary W. Flake, Using web structure for classifying and describing web pages, Proceedings of the 11th international conference on World Wide Web, May 07-11, 2002, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA [doi>10.1145/511446.511520]
• 6: http://educom.edu.
• 7: http://ike.engr.washington.edu/igc.
• 8: http://www.sloan.org/education/ALN.new.html.
• 9: http://www.westgov.org/SMART/VU/VU.HTML.
• 10: Jansen B. J. Searches, the subjects they searchn and sufficiency: a study of a large sample of excite searches. In Web-net '98, Orlando, USA, 1998.
• 11: Klawonn F., Castro J. L. "Similarity in Fuzzy Reasoning". Mathware & Soft Computing, pages 197-228, 1995.
• 12: Laks V. S. Lakshmanan , Iyer N. Subramanian , Fereidoon Sadri, A Declarative Language for Querying and Restructuring the Web, Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering (RIDE '96) Interoperability of Nontraditional Database Systems, p.12, February 26-27, 1996
• 13: Lawrence, S. and Giles, C. L. Nature. volume 400, pages 107-109, 1999.
• 14: Loia V., Luongo P., Senatore S. and Sessa M. I. "A Similarity-based View to Distributed Information Retrieval with Mobile Agents". In The 10th IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, Melbourne, Australia, December 2-5, 2001.
• 15: Loia V., Senatore S. and Sessa M. I. "Similarity-based Agents for Email Mining". In Proc. of the joint Conference IFSA/NAFIPS 2001, Vancouver, Canada, July 25-28, 2001.
• 16: Loia V., Senatore S. and Sessa M. I. "Given a message, find legitimate readers: a "flexible" MailBot-based Approach". 2001 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE SMC 2001), October 7-10, 2001.
• 17: Vincenzo Loia , Salvatore Sessa, A soft computing framework for adaptive agents, Soft computing agents: new trends for designing autonomous systems, Physica-Verlag GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany, 2002
• 18: Loke S. W. and Davison A. Logicweb: Enhancing the web with logic programming. In The Journal of Logic Programming, volume 36, pages 195-240, 1998.
• 19: Loke S. W. and Davison A. The implementation of a system for declarative mobile code and web querying. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Applications of Prolog, pages 197-204, Tokyo, Japan, September 1998.
• 20: Pinkerton, B. Finding what people want: experiences with the webcrawler. In Second International World Wide Web Conference Chicago, USA, October 1994.
• 21: Reiter R. Towards a logical reconstruction of relational dabase theory. In M. L. Brodie, J. Mylopoulous, J. W. Scmidt Eds., editor, On Conceptual Modelling, pages 191-238. Springer, 1984.
• 22: Erik Warren Selberg , Oren Etzioni, Towards comprehensive web search, 1999
• 23: Selberg, E. and Etzioni, O. On the instability of web search engine. In RIAO 2000, 2000.
• 24: Maria I. Sessa, Approximate reasoning by similarity-based SLD resolution, Theoretical Computer Science, v.275 n.1-2, p.389-426, March 28 2002 [doi>10.1016/S0304-3975(01)00188-8]
• 25: Zadeh L. A. "Fuzzy sets". Information and Control, pages 8:338-353, 1965.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
knowledge discovery, mobile computation, similarity-based reasoning, web searching