Data & Knowledge Engineering 69 (2010) 357–370
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Data & Knowledge Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/datak
Context-similarity based hotlinks assignment: Model, metrics and algorithm D. Antoniou *, J. Garofalakis, C. Makris, Y. Panagis, E. Sakkopoulos University of Patras, Computer Engineering and Informatics Dept., 26504 Patras, Greece
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 6 August 2008 Received in revised form 15 April 2009 Accepted 16 April 2009 Available online 3 May 2009
Keywords: Information Retrieval Customization and user profiles Inf. services on the web Hotlink assignment
a b s t r a c t Enhancing web browsing experience is an open issue frequently dealt using hotlinks assignment between webpages, shortcuts from one node to another. Our aim is to provide a novel, more efficient approach to minimize the expected number of steps needed to reach expected pages when browsing a website. We present a randomized algorithm, which combines the popularity of the webpages, the website structure, and for the first time to the best authors’ knowledge, the similarity of context between pages in order to suggest the placement of suitable hotlinks. We verify experimentally that users need less page transitions to reach expected information pages when browsing a website, enhanced using the proposed algorithm. Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction The world wide web has been witnessed through the last few years as a platform for a plethora of aggregated information. This information extends way beyond its original hypertextual form including, most commonly, streaming audio, video, dynamic web content, etc. Notably, web is also manifesting its presence in ubiquitous computing devices, extending thereby its user community. The diverse form of media and the continuously broadening user community of the web, are posing a handful of intriguing challenges to web developers and website administrators, as far as the visit volume and the content presentation is concerned. The main target in the design and presentation task is to be able to analyze user visit patterns and accordingly modify website content in order to promote popular content. Recently, new algorithms are presented that utilize webpage categories to personalize search results [17,18], intelligent information agents are developed in order to cope with the difficulties associated with the information overload of the user [13], recommender systems are applicable to an even broader range of applications [1] and information and knowledge can be retrieved on favor of the user using data mining and the construction of automated lessons [16,20]. In this paper we reexamine hotlink assignment, a popular site modification technique. The concept of hotlinks, first introduced by Perkowitz and Etzioni [21], presents the idea of non-destructive modification of the link structure of the web in order to minimize the total path length to popular pages in the site. Subsequent papers, see, e.g. [3,7] and the list of works described in Section 2, strive to provide algorithms to assign hotlinks to the website structure for different types of websites, modeled as directed acyclic graphs.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +30 6937292795. E-mail addresses:
[email protected] (D. Antoniou),
[email protected] (J. Garofalakis),
[email protected] (C. Makris), panagis@ceid. upatras.gr (Y. Panagis),
[email protected] (E. Sakkopoulos). 0169-023X/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2009.04.007
