Towards simulation-based similarity of end user browsing processes

  • Authors:

  • Sudhir Agarwal;Martin Junghans

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Institutes AIFB and KSRI, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ICWE'13 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

For increasingly sophisticated use cases an end user needs to extract, combine, and aggregate information from various (often dynamic) web pages from different websites. Current search engines do not focus on combining information from various web pages in order to answer the overall information need of the user. Semantic Web and Linked Data usually take a static view on the data and rely on providers cooperation. Web automation scripts, initially developed for testing websites, allow end users to capture their browsing activities as executable processes and share them with other end users. A script can contain instructions for accessing, extracting and merging (dynamic) information from various websites for a particular purpose. Techniques for allowing users to search for scripts that satisfy complex constraints restrict to existing scripts in the repository, i.e. they do not deduce scripts that may satisfy the request as well. In this paper, we show how semantic descriptions of web sites can be derived from such scripts, and how such semantic descriptions of web sites along with usage information present in the scripts can be used to obtain new scripts with similar functionality.