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Building a Directory for the Underdeveloped Web: An Experiment on the Arabic Medical Web Directory

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Asian Digital Libraries. Looking Back 10 Years and Forging New Frontiers (ICADL 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4822))

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Abstract

Despite significant growth of the Web in recent years, some portions of the Web remain largely underdeveloped, as shown in a lack of high quality content and functionality. An example is the Arabic Web, in which a lack of well-structured Web directories has limited users’ ability to browse for Arabic resources. In this research, we proposed an approach to building Web directories for the underdeveloped Web and developed a proof-of-concept prototype called Arabic Medical (AMed) Web Directory that supports browsing of over 5,000 Arabic medical Web sites and pages organized in a hierarchical structure. We conducted an experiment involving Arab subjects and found that AMed directory significantly outperformed a benchmark Arabic Web directory in terms of browsing effectiveness and user ratings. This research thus contributes to developing a useful Web directory for organizing information of the Arabic medical domain and to better understanding of supporting browsing on the underdeveloped Web.

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Dion Hoe-Lian Goh Tru Hoang Cao Ingeborg Torvik Sølvberg Edie Rasmussen

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Chung, W., Chen, H. (2007). Building a Directory for the Underdeveloped Web: An Experiment on the Arabic Medical Web Directory. In: Goh, D.HL., Cao, T.H., Sølvberg, I.T., Rasmussen, E. (eds) Asian Digital Libraries. Looking Back 10 Years and Forging New Frontiers. ICADL 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4822. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77094-7_59

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77094-7_59

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77093-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77094-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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