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Web application demands for more intelligent search functionality provide many
opportunities for applications of artificial intelligence techniques. Web sites are
encompassing more complex content and functionality and are becoming more
difficult to search by standard web search engines (e.g., AltaVista[12], Lycos[14],
etc.). Even today, many sites need to provide their own search functionality in order to
(i) limit the scope of the search, (ii) exploit knowledge of the structure of the internal
site, and (iii) exploit understanding of the content of the site. Many of these searches
are beginning to use artificial intelligence techniques to provide better organization of,
understanding of, access to, and reasoning with information. In this paper, we will
present our vision of a ``smart search'' functionality which relies on a standard text
search augmented with knowledge representation techniques. We will also describe
directions for further work.
We have been involved with a number of web sites where initial market research
suggests that search is not as effective as it could be if background knowledge were
used to support the query process. We began to explore ways to make search appear
more intelligent by exploiting any available problem knowledge. Some of the areas
that we are exploring include: background taxonomies of domain information (drawn
from controlled vocabularies such as UMLS, SNOMED, Standard Industrial
Classification (SIC) codes, or other ontological information sources), knowledge of
the type of information (such as dates or strings, which have an ordering that may be
exploited), meta-tagged information (such as SIC code classification or other
categorization information), or knowledge about what type of information is stored in
what sources (such as descriptions of what can be in databases or what can be in
certain parts of databases).
In this paper, we will give a brief description of a few web applications with complex
search needs, present a framework for our current solution, and suggest directions for
intelligent search projects.
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