An Architecture for Personal Semantic Web Information Retrieval System Integrating Web services and Web contents

Haibo Yu Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering Kyushu University 6-1 Kasuga-Koen, Kasuga Fukuoka 816-8580, Japan yu@al.is.kyushu-u.ac.jp Tsunenori Mine and Makoto Amamiya Faculty of Information Science and Electrical Engineering Kyushu University 6-1 Kasuga-Koen, Kasuga Fukuoka 816-8580, Japan {mine, amamiya}@al.is.kyushu-u.ac.jp

Abstract
The semantic Web and Web services technologies have provided both new possibilities and challenges to automatic information processing. There are a lot of researches on applying these new technologies to current personal Web information retrieval systems, but no research addresses the semantic issues from the whole life cycle and architecture point of view. Web services provide a new way for accessing Web resources, but until now, they have been managed separately from conventional Web contents resources. In this paper, we point out new system requirements and propose a conceptual architecture for a personal semantic Web information retrieval system. It incorporates semantic Web, Web services and multi-agent technologies to enable not only precise location of Web resources but also the automatic or semi-automatic integration of hybrid Web contents and Web service resources.

1. Introduction
1.1 Motivation

With ever-increasing information overload, Web information retrieval systems are facing new challenges for helping people not only locating relevant information precisely but also accessing and aggregating a variety of information from different resources automatically. The semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-dened meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation [5]. It provides new possibilities for automatic Web information processing.

Currently, there are a lot of researches such as [25] [13] [27] trying to apply semantic Web technologies to Web information retrieval systems, but they all address only problems concerning certain phases or certain aspects of the total complex issues involved. There isnt any research addressing the semantic issues from the whole life cycle of information retrieval and architecture point of view. However, for the reasons we show below, we argue that it is important to clarify the requirements of a Web information retrieval system architecture to apply semantic web technology to it. First, we need to ensure the semantics are not lost sight of during the whole life cycle of information retrieval, including publishing, querying, accessing, processing, storing and reusing. For example, current semantic Web portals such as SEAL [27] manage their semantic data for navigation, and semantic searching internally, but when they publish data to the user, they will transform their semantic data into HTML format in order to present human understandable information which can be accessed through a browser. At this moment, the semantic is lost, and the user cannot use it for further semantic processing. So the interfaces involved in the whole life cycle of information retrieval tasks need to be re-considered. Second, efcient searching for high quality results is based on pertinent matching between well-dened resources and user queries, where the matching reects user preferences. Just as in current Web usage, when users use search engines to search for specic information, the quality of the search results will be improved signicantly if they are familiar with the mechanism of the indexing and make use of advanced functionalities to select and combine keywords well. In the same way, in a semantic Web information retrieval system, we also need to help users to submit pertinent queries and efciently incorporate their preferences

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based on mechanisms through which a provider categorizes and publishes its semantic data and Web services. So the description of Web site capability and the way of submitting queries incorporating user preferences should be consistently considered from an architectural point of view. Web service mechanisms provide a good solution for application interoperability between heterogeneous environments. Though they have mainly been used for business processes until now, we have seen that WSRP [15] has been approved as a standard of OASIS [4] to integrate remote portlets, and we can predict that Web services will soon be used by Web portals for information gathering, display and delivery [14]. Web services will provide a new way for accessing Web information and play a vital role in Web information retrieval activities. However, the conventional Web contents resources target at human consumption but new Web services resources target at machine consumption. Thus they have been managed separately for publishing, discovering, accessing, and processing until now. On the other hand, in the semantic Web, contents are given welldened meaning, and they are becoming such data that can be understood and processed by machine as well. As both Web contents and Web services will be consumed by machines, this introduces the possibility and necessity of managing them together in a personal Web information retrieval system. In this paper, we propose a conceptual architecture for a personal semantic Web information retrieval system. It incorporates semantic Web, Web services and multi-agent technologies to enable not only precise location of Web resources but also the automatic or semi-automatic integration of hybrid semantic information from Web content and Web service resources.

1.2

Approach

A conceptual architecture of our semantic Web information retrieval system is constructed based on the following three main ideas. First, all participants contribute to the semantic description consistently. The Web information retrieval system concerns three main kinds of participants: the consumer which searches for Web resources, the provider which holds certain resources, and the mediator which enables the communication between the consumer and the provider. In order to guarantee semantic interoperability during the whole life cycle of information retrieval, all participants need to consistently contribute to the semantic description. The provider needs to precisely describe their capabilities and the users need to pertinently describe their requirements as well. The mediator needs to correctly interpret the semantic dimension and to ensure that semantics are not lost sight of during the processing.

Second, integrating Web contents with Web services. As we mentioned earlier, Web services will provide a new way for retrieving Web information. In fact, Web users do not care about how the system discovers, accesses and retrieves information from what kind of resources, they only care about the nal results which can be directly used efciently. So, the particular characteristics and the concrete realization details of both Web services and Web contents need to be hidden from users as much as possible. Therefore an integrated or unied management of Web contents and Web services needs to be carried out through different levels including the description of capabilities and requirements, querying, discovering, selection and aggregation. Third, providing a gateway to all the information that the user is interested in. Since the user needs to access and process a variety of internal and external information, a gateway to all relevant information is necessary. Although Web portals are trying to provide such gateways, they are centralized resources using xed organizational schema targeting uniform access by large numbers of people [25]. However, no one size can t all, and even a portal with a wealth of resources can not satisfy all the requirements of a user. As a user is only interested in certain parts of the resources provided by the portal, the personalization functionality and the integration of different Web portals are strongly required. Currently, there are several Web portals providing personalization such as My Yahoo [3], My AOL [2], to aggregate desired channels, such as news, weather, or sports, and view personalized contents. However their customization functions are limited as they lack semantics and are separated from users local information. Relevant Web information needs to be stored, modied, searched, even published as well as existing local information provided by the user, and the integration of Web information with local user information is also necessary. We argue that a personalized Myportal [28] can satisfy all the Web usage requirements of a user. The Myportal is different from current personalized portals in a sense that it is located on a users own desktop or local server, owned by the user her/himself, managing all the information based on semantic Web technologies, enabling integration of existing local user information and Web information, and providing full personalization and exible customization functions for all userrelevant information. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 outlines our conceptual architecture, the components and their communication interfaces of a personal semantic Web information retrieval system. Section 3 describes the integration of Web services and Web contents. In section 4 we explain the process ow of an information retrieval system. Related work is discussed in section 5 and the concluding remarks will be summarized in section 6.

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Web Site 1
WSCD
(GID, WCD, WSD)

Web Site 2
WSCD
(GID, WCD, WSD)

Web Site n

WSCD (Web Site Capability Description) GID (General Information Description) WCD (Web Content Description)

WSCD
(GID, WCD, WSD)

PSA 1

PSA 2 CSA

PSA n

WSD (Web Service Description)

Inference Engine
User Preference

Database SE KB

SWSD (Semantic Web Service Description) CWSD (Concrete Web Service Description)

UIA

MyPortal

Figure 2. Web Site Capability Description Figure 1. A Conceptual Architecture Second, we give the Web content capability description (WCD) and Web service capability description (WSD). There are links from GID to WCD and WSD for facilitating the further matching and use of Web contents and Web services. In order to semantically describe the capabilities and support the concrete realization of services, we express the service capability description in two layers: semantic Web service description (SWSD) and concrete Web service description (CWSD). This hierarchical capability-describing mechanism enables semantic capability-describing and matchmaking for different levels. Currently, there are only a few drafts of standards available for describing semantic Web services such as OWL-S [9] and WSMO [11], and none of them have been adopted by any standards body at the present time. As OWL-S is the rst well-researched Web service ontology, and currently has numerous users from industries and academe, we use OWL-S for the semantic Web service description and WSDL [12] for the concrete Web service description. The Web content description (WCD) is the metadata of Web contents. It is composed of knowledge bases of all domains involved. The domain ontologies are described in OWL [20] and the metadata is described in RDF [16]. The WSCD is put at the root directory of the Web site as an RDF le, and the WCD and WSD can be reached through the links of them. For the details of our Web site capability description mechanism, one can refer to document [29].

A Conceptual Architecture

Our conceptual architecture for a personal semantic Web information retrieval system is illustrated in gure 1. Because the P2P architecture provides a robust system which accommodates to open and dynamic Web environments, we choose a P2P network architecture to connect consumers and providers. Each provider describes their capabilities in what we call a WSCD (Web site capability description) and is assigned a PSA (provider search agent). Each consumer describes the users requirements including preferences. It is assigned a consumer search agent (CSA) and also has a user interface agent (UIA) that provides an intelligent unied interface to the user. The CSA and PSA will function as mediators between a consumer and a provider by communicating with each other to fulll the searching and accessing task. The consumer is constructed as a Myportal providing a gateway to all relevant information.

2.1

Web site capability description (WSCD)

Resource location is based on matching between user requirements and Web site capabilities, so a capability description of Web sites is necessary. We describe the layered capabilities of a Web site as shown in gure 2. First, we semantically describe the general capabilities of the Web site, and we call this a general information description (GID). We argue that some explicit general ideas about a Web site are strongly required in order to precisely locate Web resources based on user preferences. Therefore a brief general information description of the Web site is dened at the top level. The GID gives an explicit overview of the Web portal capabilities, and can be used as the initial lter for judging congruence with user preferences. The GID includes the description about Category, Topic, Type, Language, Scale, Audience, HomePageLink, Location, ServiceLink, Security, and Functionalities.

2.2

Myportal

Myportal is a one stop that links the user to all the information s/he needs. It resites on the users own desktop or local server and is designed to satisfy users personal information requirements and to be mastered freely by the user her/himself. The information can be shared by others with proper authority. The structure of Myportal is shown in gure 3. Myportal is composed of three main functional com-

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UIA
Information Accessing Function as a provider

Myportal

CSA

Information Collection & Aggregation (Function as a consumer) Human Machine Automatic / Semi- Manual (User himself, (Browsing and (Web automatic Services, Community member, (Web Services / searching) Public user) Crawler) Crawler)

in missing or inherent information based on user preferences, breaks and transforms the requirements into formal queries and sends them to the CSA. The CSA receives formal queries from the UIA, communicates with relevant agents, selects and invokes Web services, integrates the information and sends the results back to the UIA. The PSA receives queries from a CSA and returns matching results to the CSA based on different preferences and requirements.

Machine

Human

Web Services Crawler & Other User himself Community Public applications member

2.4

Communication interfaces

Query Engine Knowledge Warehouse (KW) User Inference Preferences Domain Engine Web Services WSCD Knowledge Management

Web Services Management

Knowledge Management

Figure 3. Structure of Myportal

ponents: core component, consumer component and provider component. The core component provides basic support for semantic technologies and information management. It consists of Knowledge Warehouse (KW), Knowledge Management, Query Engine (QE) and Inference Engine (IE). As a consumer, it will bring together a variety of necessary information from different resources automatically or semiautomatically for the user. It is assigned a CSA to fulll the information retrieval tasks through the communication with provider agents. As a provider, the contents and services of Myportal can be consumed by humans as well as machines. The human can be the user or other permitted persons, and the machine can be local or remote. The interfaces for browsing, searching and facilitating Web contents and services need to be provided. We described Myportal in a little more detail in document [28].

In order to fullll the information retrieval task, the interfaces between providers and consumers including query language and protocol for communicating those queries need to be dened. As semantic Web information is based on RDF to represent data, a standard interface for querying and accessing RDF data is ideal for the interoperability between heterogeneous environment. Currently, there are many query languages for RDF data have been created, but they lack both a common syntax and a common semantics. The W3C RDF Data Accessing Working Group (DAWG) has published their working drafts of RDF Query Language SPARQL [23] and SPARQL protocol [8] that are expected to be standards in this eld. The RDF Query Language SPARQL expresses queries over RDF graphs, and SPARQL protocol for RDF denes a protocol for communicating those queries to an RDF data service. The applications can access and combine semantic Web information across the Web by combining SPARQL query language and protocol for RDF. Although our architecture is designed for any reasonable communication interfaces, we are currently planning to use SPARQL RDF query language and SPARQL protocol as our communication interfaces between providers and consumers.

2.5

The description of user requirements

2.3

Mediator

In our architecture, we use a multi-agent system called KODAMA [30] that has been developed at Kyushu University as our mediators. KODAMA is a high quality, largescale multi-agent system which can operate in open environments. It is a global distributed computing architecture based on agent-oriented programming and was demonstrated suitable for network-aware applications. The agents in our system consist of UIA, CSAs and PSAs. The UIA receives requirements from the user, factors

The user requirements are reected by his/her preferences, prole and constraints along with aquery. We provide a user interface which enables the input of all these information. Input templates, default settings, and recommendation lists are also provided. The missing or inherent information will be inferred based on the user prole and preferences, and the requirements will be broken down and transformed into formal queries. The formal query is composed of three types of element elds: user preferences (UPs), content query (CQ) and Web service query (SQ). And the responses will combine Web content and Web service information together. Even if the user does not explicitly describe their requirements on Web services for each query, searching for Web services potentially relevant to him/her will automatically be carried unless s/he explicitly

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refuses such searching.

2.6

Ontology considerations

The description of Web site capabilities and the management of data in Myportal must be based on formally dened vocabularies in order to make them machineunderstandable and processable. Ontology is used to formally dene terms and the relationships between them. Currently, the style of the ontology for the future semantic Web is still under discussion. A huge common ontology or numerous small ontologies which are mapped to each other by mediators are possible styles. Our analysis showed that a wide and shallow ontology for categorization is necessary and narrow and deep ontologies are also needed for the users specic interests such as research topic, business or hobby. Though it is not yet a reality, we assume that the user and the providers are using the same ontology as what they involved at the current stage. The Web site capability ontology should include the following component ontologies. 1) The general information description ontology: In this ontology component, the terms used for the Web site general information description such as type, location, and the relationships between them and restrictions on them are formally dened. 2) The domain specic ontology: A domain specic ontology should be constructed in order to realize the interoperability between all the applications and users of that domain. The system can dene its own ontology or reuse existing ones for domains that they involved. 3) The Web service ontology: This ontology component denes all the terms, relationships, and restrictions concerning Web services. Here we use OWL-S [9] Web service ontology.

agents on behalf of their users. So Web contents are in the process of becoming data with well-dened meaning that can also be consumed by machines. Since they target the same consumer, Web services and Web contents have the necessary common ground to be managed together in a personal Web information retrieval system. On the other hand, users also have requirements for the aggregation of different Web services and the integration of both Web services and Web contents in a personal Web information retrieval system. For example, there are many Web portals or search engines supporting searching functions (services), but users can only make use of their searching functions one at a time with a browser interface and none of those searching results can be currently aggregated together. Especially when we use this kind of semantic search functions, the semantic search results are transformed into HTML format for human consumption with detaching semantic metadata described in RDF. Therefore it is necessary to deliver the semantic data through Web services and aggregate the semantic data from different Web services. Our Web information retrieval system realizes unied management and integration of Web services and Web contents at different levels, including description, discovery, selection, and the aggregation of invocation results as we will describe in the following.

3.1

Descriptions of capabilities and requirements

On the provider side, as we described in section 2, we manage GID, WCD and WSD together as WSCD. The WSD can be reached through the GID and is described in two layers: SWSD and CWSD. With unied management, the Web services and Web contents can share the same general information such as a category and the domain ontology. The hierarchical capability-describing mechanism enables semantic capability-describing and matchmaking for different levels. We use WSDL [12] and OWL-S for CWSD and SWSD respectively. The WCD is the metadata of Web contents. It is composed of knowledge bases of all domains involved. The domain ontologies are described in OWL [20] and the metadata is described in RDF [16]. On the consumer side, we provide a template-style input interface, enabling users to input or select their preferences as well as query items from recommendation lists. The formal query is composed of three types of element elds: user preferences (UP), contents query (CQ) and Web service query (SQ). And the responses will combine Web contents and Web services information together.

Integration of Web services and Web contents

Conventional Web contents target at human consumption and are published with standard languages such as HTML, which can be accessed through a client browser. Standard HTTP protocol is used for the communication between a Web server and a Web client. Web services, on the other hand, target at machine consumption, and are applications which can be realized at heterogeneous systems, published with a standard language such as WSDL [12] and accessed by applications through a standard protocol such as SOAP [17]. Due to their different usages by different consumers, Web contents and Web services have been managed separately until now. However, in the semantic Web, information is marked up with metadata and can be manipulated by autonomous

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3.2

Discovery

There are three models that Web service discovery is based on: matchmaking, broker and P2P [7] and there is also centralized and decentralized searching for Web contents. Our Web information retrieval system is based on a P2P architecture, and the matching is realized by the PSAs on the provider side. OWL-S is an ontology for Web services, but before we use the ontology of a specic Web service, we need to position a service within the broad array of services that exists in the world. OWL-S 1.1 [9] provides an example of prolebased class hierarchies [10] for categorizing Web services. We noticed that almost all the Web service providers provide Web services for machine consumption as well as consistent Web information or browser based services for human consumption at the same time. Thus the information both for human and machine consumption is generally consistent and in the same category. Therefore we think it is reasonable to use the category information inside the GID to nd potential Web sites which possibly contain relevant Web services rst, and then do the detailed matching of existing services based on their OWL-S descriptions. The information discovery is based on matching between user requirements and provider capabilities. We do matching at three levels. First, we do matching of Web site general description (GID) against user preferences to see whether they match at the overview level or not. Second, we do matching of Web contents, and nally do the matching of Web services. A matching score will be given from the matching of each level and they will be used for the nal judgment of relevance of Web contents and Web services. There are researches on semantic Web services such as [18] and [19]. We make use of their research and development results for our semantic Web service matchmaking and processes.

UIA. The results from different Web services invocation as well as the results of Web contents will be aggregated by the CSA into a rened nal result based on user preferences and be sent to the user through the UIA. This result can be evaluated, modied and stored in the users Myportal knowledge warehouse for the future reuse. The integration of different Web service invocation results and Web contents is based on their common RDF data model.

Process Flow

The total process ow of the Web information retrieval system can be illustrated as shown in gure 4.
Provider
Capability Description (WSCD)

Consumer
Profile & Preferences Myportal Knowledge Warehouse (KW) User: Requirements Description UIA: Completing missing information, transforming into formal query SE: Search inside Myportal KW Found relevant information? CSA: Send requests to PSAs List of relevant information Web sites, Web contents, services services Selection Potential providers Relevant Web sites, Web contents Yes

PSA: Matching GID with preferences (Score1) PSA: Matching WCD with CQ (Score2) PSA: Matching WSD with SQ (Score3) PSA: Send matching result to CSA if total score > threshold

Web sites

Web sites, contents

PSA: Communication with CSA User: Intervention

Invocation Invocation results

Integration User: Evaluation, modification and storing UIA: Modify preferences

Figure 4. Process Flow

3.3

Selection

As we described immediately above, matching of user requirements with provider capabilities will be done at three levels and a matching score will be given from the matching of each level. PSAs will send back their matching scores to the CSA, and the CSA will judge and select the most relevant Web services and Web contents based on a total consideration of those matching scores.

3.4

Aggregation

After selecting the most relevant Web services, the CSA will invoke those services. If the input information is not sufcient for triggering invocation, the CSA will request the user to provide the necessary information through the

Although we will not repeat the tasks of each information retrieval phase that have been described in last section, we will emphasize on the following aspects. First, searching for relevant information inside Myportal knowledge warehouse will be carried out rst, and only when we can not nd satised information from Myportal, we will continue the searching from the other providers. As we tend to repeatedly and frequently use a certain amount of information from the Web but seldom or never use other information, it is essential to locally store frequently used information for the user and the external access only happens when the request cannot be satised locally. Because the information that interests the user is a limited resource and external accessing time is decreased, the total retrieval time will be signicantly decreased compared to a search of the vast open Web. Second, the list of relevant information sent back from PSAs will be different depending on the user preferences

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and Web site capabilities. The user has different possible Web usages, such as only locating certain kind of Web sites, locating certain kind of Web sites and their Web contents, only locating Web services, and locating all relevant resources including Web sites, Web contents and Web services. The provider may only have Web contents or have both Web contents and Web services. Therefore the PSA may send back different possible list of relevant information resources as shown in gure 4. Third, during the invocation, if the input information inside the query is not enough, the PSA will ask the user to input missed information through the UIA. So the user intervention may occur during invocation. Fourth, the integrated information can be evaluated by the user and the evaluation results will be used for renement of future searching. The information can also be modied and stored into Myportal knowledge warehouse for the future reuse. The user preferences will be automatically rened based on the searching and evaluation results.

Related work

In this section, we discuss some related work that is directly or indirectly of interest to our research work. Francisco et al. [22] presented an architecture for an infrastructure to provide interoperability using trusted portals and implemented such an infrastructure based on Thematic Portals. The searching portals use semantic access points based on metadata for more precise searching of the resources associated with the potential sources of information. The proposed architecture supports specic and cross domain searching, but only provides semantic representation for the capabilities of Web contents not for their services as far as we understand. Our semantic Web site capability description and pertinent user requirements and preferences description provide interoperability for both Web contents and Web services. RSS [26] and Atom [21] are lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata descriptions and syndication formats. They are XML-based applications and conform to the RDF specication. A brief description of Web site capability can be summarized with them and the summary can be used for online publication, retrieval and further transmission or aggregation. FOAF vocabulary [6] provides a collection of basic terms that can be used in machine-readable Web homepages for people, groups, companies and so on. The initial focus of FOAF has been on the description of people, but now it is under extension to express other kinds of things. RSS, Atom and FOAF vocabulary all focus on certain kinds of Web contents description such as news, Web blog or people, they do not include Web services as we proposed. Our Web site capability description describes not only Web contents but also Web services, so the resources of the portal

can not only be located but also used as a computational part of the information retrieval system. RSS, Atom and FOAF can be used for the Web contents capability description which is a part of our Web site capability description. There are Web portals based on Semantic Web technology, such as KA2 [1] and SEAL [27], which support a semantic portal solution including ontology-based contents construction and maintenance, but they target uniform access by large numbers of people for human navigation and searching. SEAL provided an interface for a software agent but only for a crawler. None of them supports Web services for information aggregation and publishing at present, as far as we know. Our Myportal is a personalized gateway to all user-relevant information and it not only aggregates Web information but also shares its information through Web services. Haystacks per-user information environment [25] emphasizes the relationship between a particular individual and his corpus. It automatically captures and modies its data and its retrieval process based on user behaviors in order to adapt its system to the user to realize personalization. This user information system has not been constructed from the Web portal point of view and doesnt emphasize the support of machine interoperability between users enabling Web service functionalities and user information sharing. The semantic Web browser [24] can search and present possible Web services for the user, but it does not aggregate the invocation results of different Web services and Web contents as we proposed. We refer to their ideas of personalization in information retrieval and ltering, but construct our user information system as a fully personalized Web portal, which supports Web services and can be accessed by the others to form a basic unit of a P2P information retrieval system. OWL-S [9] is an ontology of services which provides a mechanism for semantically expressing the capability of Web services. In our approach, we use OWL-S to describe Web portal service capabilities, and add another General Information Description layer above it to enable the unied management of Web services and Web contents. This will help in the precise location of Web portals as well as the efcient discovery and invocation of Web services.

Conclusion

In this paper, we addressed the main aspects of a semantic Web information retrieval system architecture trying to answer the requirements of next-generation semantic Web users. We proposed a mechanism for semantically describing the capabilities of Web sites, enabling automatic discovery of Web sites and Web contents as well as Web services. Our Myportal aims at constructing a fully personalized users local Web portal, which is adapted to user preferences

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and satises all the requirements of a users Web usage. The user Web portal can be used as a basic unit of a P2P information retrieval system. In the future, we will realize a prototype of a multiagent based P2P personal Web information retrieval system, and evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture based on it. Currently, we assume that all the portals, users and agents in a community agree on a common ontology that involved and use it to represent the semantics of Web portal capabilities and Web services, but its not easy to get this agreement in reality. We need to give further consideration to these ontology-mapping issues in the future.

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