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Abstract. The World Wide Web is a simple yet effective
medium for users to search, browse,
and retrieve information. In recent years, there has
been a prevalence of search engines that
can find useful information in the Web.
Unfortunately, current search engines cannot search
and summarize the most important “object” that may be searched ¡people, because these
search engines always treat the name of a person as
a normal string and thus, lacks a natural
associated relation between the keyword representing
the name and a human being. Moreover,
they only provide Web pages in ranked order instead
of summaries,
which may consume too much of users’ time to extract out individual information manually.
Searching for a person is a very challenging task
because any person has his/her own attributes
and may be difficult to be modeled, especially
while searching from a huge data source, i.e., the
Web. However, once the issue is tackled the award is
substantial, not only could we search and
know people on the fly, but most importantly, the
individual information can be applied and may
largely improve the effectiveness and efficiency of
personal oriented systems, such as
usercomputer interaction, mobile services, social
networks, online dating, employee finding,
e-stores, education and training, and so forth.
Although there are many existing systems that are
designed to be personalized,the individual
information is only used for the individuals’ own framework and cannot shared to others.
Moreover, as far as this researcher knows, there are
no existing systems aimed at summarizing
individual information and model users from the
whole Web, mainly due to the difficulty of mining
such a huge
and dynamic database. I propose to develop a unified system which provides
a
convenient
interface based on ontology user model (to embrace the recent trend of
Semantic
Web), as a
Web service or middleware for other personal oriented systems.
Furthermore, it should be mentioned that users are uncomfortable in
exposing their private
preferential
information to others. Thus, my proposal addresses another challenge issue
that
while developing
an effective people search system, users’privacy
should be preserved carefully
by using
effective mechanisms.
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