A Web Browsing System for Retrieving Scholarly Pages

The major Web search engines are useful tools to find information from the Web but their commercial nature, coupled with some other factors, makes it difficult to find scholarly pages on a specific topic. Many users prefer browsing to searching because it is easier. Even though browsing subject directories is an important method to retrieve information from the Web, such directories are not suitable for specific scientific retrieval tasks. In this paper, we present a Web browsing system focused on scholarly pages related to a specific topic. The first implementation is dedicated to the topic climate change, but the method to construct the system is a general method that can be applied to any reasonable topic. The climate change browsing system provides access through links to the thematic Web pages of scientific organizations engaged in climate change research, as well as to the pages of organizations that are linked to them. Each link in the system is categorized under a given index term based on the occurrences of phrases related to climate change (keyphrases) on the target pages of the links. In browsing, the user clicks the desired index term and the system returns a list of links to the pages associated with the index term. This paper also presents the crawler used to fetch pages for the browsing system and a keyphrase dictionary used in indexing the pages included in the system.