An infrastructure for open latent semantic linking

The more the web grows, the harder it is for users to find the information they need. As a result, it is even more difficult to identify when documents are related. To find out that two or more documents are in fact related, users have to navigate by the documents in carry out an analysis about their content. This paper presents an infrastructure allowing the use of latent semantic analysis and open hypermedia concepts in the automatic identification of relationships among web pages. Latent Semantic Analysis has been proposed by the information retrieval community as an attempt to organize automatically text objects into a semantic structure appropriate for matching. In open hypermedia systems, links are managed and stored in a special database, a linkbase, which allows the addition of hypermedia functionality to a document without changing the original structure and format of the document. We first present two complementary link-related efforts: an extensible latent semantic indexing service and an open linkbase service. Leveraging off those efforts, we present an infrastructure that identifying latent semantic links within web repositories and makes them available in an open linkbase. To demonstrate by example the utility of our open infrastructure, we built an application presenting a directory of semantic links extracted from web sites.