Navigation across the Internet consists of jumping across a set of links
interactively chosen by the user during a session with an Internet browser.
This may be arduous because of the absence of an effective classification scheme
for the enormous amount of information available
through billions of inter-linked UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATORs (URLs).
Altogether, this huge world-wide ``information system''
has the structure of an untyped semantic network [5].
The basic idea put forward in this paper is to use the SOUR
software system
as an Internet Navigation Assistant. SOUR is a system for comparing,
classifying and retrieving information about large software systems.
Figure 1 depicts the overall structure
of the system [16][15][14][18][17][19].
Figure 1: SOUR Overall Architecture
The unit of information in SOUR is the so-called Abstract Object (AO), a notion which combines the enumerative and faceted classification schemes [10][11][12] as an extension of the popular attributive view of objects in the context of a hierarchical semantic network information model.
A crucial decision to make is how to map Internet nodes onto the SOUR
information model.
A URL refers to the format used by World Wide Web (WWW) [21]
documents to locate files on other servers. A URL gives the type of
resource being accessed (e.g., gopher, WAIS), the address of the server
and the path of the file. The format is
scheme://host.domain[:port]/path/filename
where scheme is one of
file | file on your local system, or a file on an anonymous ftp server |
---|---|
http | a resource on a World Wide Web server |
gopher | a resource on a Gopher server |
WAIS | a resource on a WAIS server |
news | an Usenet newsgroup |
telnet | a connection to a telnet-based service |
The above information scheme can be turned into a SOUR class scheme in a way that will be described in this paper. But a summary of the overall SOUR information model will be presented beforehand.