Semantic Layering with Magpie

Abstract

Browsing the web involves two main tasks: finding the right web page and then making sense of its content. A significant amount of research has gone into supporting the task of finding web resources through 'standard' information retrieval mechanisms, or semantics-enhanced search. Much less attention has been paid to the second problem. In this paper we describe Magpie, a tool which supports the interpretation of web pages. Magpie acts as a complementary knowledge source, which a reader can call upon to quickly gain access to any background knowledge relevant to a web resource. Magpie works by automatically associating an ontology based semantic layer to web resources, allowing relevant services to be directly invoked within a standard web browser. The functionality of Magpie is illustrated using examples of how it has been integrated with our lab's web resources.

Collaborative Semantic Web Browsing with Magpie

“…It is vital that the ontology is automatically populated from relevant web resources. Our currently deployed version, which relies on the AKT Reference ontology, uses a mixture of ODBC database interfaces and generic scripts for population -see [6] for more details.…”

“…Our Enrich methodology was successful applied in domains as diverse domains as aerospace design engineering and widening participation in education. Magpie extends the Enrich framework through the on-the-fly semantic layering of web documents [6].…”

“…In earlier papers [6][7][8] we gave an overview of the Magpie framework and design principles and outlined Magpie's basic functionalities. A key principle underlying the design of Magpie is that the ontology provides an explicit interpretative viewpoint over the web resources.…”

Magpie – Towards a Semantic Web Browser

“…In our case, a set of techniques ('populators') was used to populate the domain ontology from heterogeneous data stored in web-accessible RDF documents, mined from organizational databases, or extracted from the standard web pages. The ontology population process is beyond the scope of this paper; for more information see [6].…”

Semantic Browsing with PowerMagpie

“…Semantic layering (the realisation of semantic links, in addition to the existing syntactic ones) is a notion that was introduced in connection with browsing and navigation in early papers about Magpie [3]. Magpie finds and highlights the entities from a particular ontology in the current web page.…”