A Web ontology description language

The work presented is part of the Web Mining Agent (WMA) project under development in our Multimedia and Mobile Agent Research Laboratory. The purpose of this project is to develop an agent system capable of automatically locating and extracting user-specified data from the Web, and to dynamically populate a database with the data for later access and retrieval. The database is kept consistent with the changes that may occur on the Web sites from which data has been extracted. The knowledge needed for extracting and marshalling the desired information is stored in Web site ontologies. The ontologies are built using the Web ONtology DEscription Language (WONDEL), an XML and XPointer-based language that we have developed within the WMA project. This paper presents the overall architecture of the Web Mining Agent and describes WONDEL in detail. It also reports on experience gained in applying WMA to build a global university database from existing university Web sites