WebClipper

Abstract

Information finding on the Web has been well served by many high-tech search engines and yet information collection of the searched information for sharing and reuse in an organized manner is another useful service for community users as well as personal users. This will effectively reduce and specialize the information search space by minimizing the cognitive overload for users in the Web surfing. This paper reports the development of a personal/community link library building system, called WebClipper which enables personal/community users to collect the indices for the Web information for more accurate search. The WebClipper manages various link information of the selected Web document and extracts their index data to form a virtual digital library for various purposes. This way, the users can collect useful information from the Web into their own link library space. When searching, they can first search their own library space before going out to navigate on the Web. Community users can share the continuously collected information of their shared libraries built by other users in the same community. In this thesis, we show an implementation of the virtual library concepts with a Web link database management scheme, Web information clipping technique, and user interface design. The proposed Web link database management technique allows the system not to archive physical data but manipulate link information thus eliminating the problem of storage and copyrights. The clipping technique allows the users to conveniently choose the granularity of the data to be collected and further carry out an automatic keyword extraction and indexing. Database management of the link data enables user-defined link description and makes deadlink management easy too.