Web Domain Knowledge Retrieval Application Framework

Domain Knowledge is associated to its area of subject, and therefore is a composition of data, rules, and processes of the specific subject. The Web has become one of the most significant sources for researchers gaining domain knowledge. Domain knowledge spreads on various Web sources, no retrieving tool can retrieve all of them. So researchers must use various retrieving tools to retrieve domain knowledge. How to integrate these retrieving tools is a challenging job.Although Web is the most successful opening information publishing mechanism, it has some defects. As new techniques and application methods, the Semantic Web and social software are solutions that resolve the problems in Web information publishing mechanism and can provide new ways to retrieve Web domain knowledge. This paper explores how to use these two techniques to build a Web domain knowledge retrieving system.Web domain knowledge retrieving is a complex subject, and its content is still changing, so it needs a long time to build a perfect web domain knowledge retrieving system. The objective of this paper is to set up a runnable framework, which has three main tasks: the architecture of system, the encapsulation of retrieving tools, the interactive model of functional units, these three parts are foundation of the system. New contents of the framework will be refined in the follow-up works.At the very end of this paper, some tests were done to verify the usability of the system. These tests prove that the system meets its design objective. By the analysis of FOAF data gathered by the system prototype, these tests also prove that it is a feasible way to use FOAF documents in rapidly finding the groups of domain researchers and getting their personal information.