Automated Ontology-Driven Metasearch Generation with Metamorph

Abstract

We present Metamorph, a system and framework for generating vertical deep Web search engines in a knowledge-based way. The approach enables the separation between the roles of a higher skilled ontology engineer and a less skilled service engineer, which adds new web sources in an intuitive, semi-automatic manner using the proven Lixto suite. One part of the framework is the understanding process for complex web search forms, and the generation of an ontological representation of each form and its intrinsic run-time dependencies. Based on these representations, a unified meta form and matchings from the meta form to the individual search forms and vice versa are created, taking into account different form element types, contents and labels. We discuss several aspects of the Metamorph ontology, which focuses especially on the interaction semantics of web forms, and give a short account of our semi-automatic tagging system.