Title : TODE : An Ontology-Based Model for the Dynamic Population of Web Directories Authors

In this paper we study how we can organize the continuously proliferating Web content into topical categories, also known as Web directories. In this respect, we have implemented a system, named TODE that uses a Topical Ontology for Directories' Editing. First, we describe the process for building our ontology of Web topics, which are treated in TODE as directories' topics. Then, we present how TODE interacts with the ontology in order to categorize Web pages into the ontology's topics and we experimentally study our system's efficiency in grouping Web pages thematically. We evaluate TODE's performance by comparing its resulting categorization for a number of pages to the categorization the same pages display in Google Directory as well as to the categorizations delivered for the same set of pages and topics by a Bayesian classifier. Results indicate that our model has a noticeable potential in reducing the human-effort overheads associated with populating Web directories. Furthermore, experimental results imply that the use of a rich topical ontology increases significantly classification accuracy for dynamic contents .