PERA - Personal Education Resource Assistant

Abstract

The dramatic rapid increase in the volume of educational resources on the Internet, requires techniques and tools that reduce educators' information overload and improve the effectiveness of on-line information access. Information overload on the World-WideWeb(WWW) is a well recognised problem. Research to subdue this problem and extract maximum benefit from the Internet is still in its infancy.Different research areas like data mining, information retrieval, machine learning and knowledge discovery, are giving the problem due attention and all seem to converge onto a common theme - wrappers.Wrappers provide access to heterogeneous information sources by converting or translating queries to source specific queries or commands. We present a novel approach, wrapper conduction to automatically generate a wrapper once an information source has been identified.The Personal Educational Resource Advisor (PERA),an information filtering system we developed, employs numerous internet information sources in an attempt to control and tame the information overload. Wrapper conduction is employed to safeguard its evolvability once new sources become available on the WWW. We examine and compare the performance PERA achieves when employing wrapper-conducted queries in contrast to tailored hand-coded ones; comparative results are presented.