The Webspace Method

The main objective of this chapter is to present the Webspace Method for modeling and querying Web-based document collections. When focusing on limited domains of the Internet, like intranets, digital libraries, and large Web sites, document collections can be found that have a high multimedia and semistructured character. Furthermore, the content of such document collections can be assumed to contain related information. Based on conceptual modelling, the Webspace Method introduces a new schema-based approach to enhance the precision, when searching such document collections. The Webspace Method allows queries to be composed that combine information stored in several documents to satisfy the user’s information need, whereas traditional search engines are only capable of querying a single document at a time. Furthermore, a query over a Webspace allows a user to formulate his information need as the result of a query over a Webspace directly, rather than a collection of URLs pointing to the possible relevant documents.