An Ontology Based Approach for Context Based Collaborative Browsing

Abstract

The work presented in this paper aims to break the conventional view of Web browsing as an individual learning activity by leveraging the notion of collaborative browsing. An ontology based approach is proposed to automatically link users on the Web who have similar or related browsing interests. The novelty of the approach lies in the fact that it utilizes not only the similarity between users’ activities but also the instructional relatedness between them, a thing that can lead to more intelligent matching results. A distance-based approach within an ontology is used to measure the relatedness between the “subject matters” of the Web pages browsed by users. Subsequently, users who have navigated related Web pages are informed of each others’ contact details and visited pages. The assessment of the service by expert judgment revealed its ability to identify semantically-related browsing activities.