Online Information Review

Network information resources management system based on knowledge mining

Chengyu ZhangPing WangYi ZhaoQiang LaiLi Kong
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Chengyu ZhangPing WangYi ZhaoQiang LaiLi Kong, (2003),"Network information resources management system based on
knowledge mining", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 Iss 2 pp. 129 - 135
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Network information
resources management
system based on
knowledge mining
Chengyu Zhang
Ping Wang
Yi Zhao
Qiang Lai and
Li Kong
The authors
Chengyu Zhang is Associate Professor and Vice Director
of the System Division, Ping Wang is Assistant Librarian
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of the System Division, and Yi Zhao, Qiang Lai and
Li Kong are graduate students, all at Tsinghua University
Library, Beijing, People's Republic of China.
Keywords
Information management, Mapping,
Information resources management, Networks,
China, Content analysis
Abstract
This article describes the analysis, design and
implementation of the network information resources
management system (NIRMS), which uses distributed
modes of content management to collect information
resources on the Internet for Chinese patrons. The first
two sections describe the architecture and framework of
the NIRMS and the network resources management
metadata (NRMM) schema. Then the modules for
resource inspection and evaluation, knowledge mining
and users' information feedback are discussed.
Electronic access
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is
available at
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
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http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
Online Information Review
Volume 27 . Number 2 . 2003 . pp. 129-135
# MCB UP Limited . ISSN 1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520310471743
129
Introduction
In May 2001, 61 major universities in China
were assembled under the China Academic
Library and Information System Project,
sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of
Education, to build navigation databases for
various subjects. As a part of the project, the
Tsinghua University Library developed an
information resources management and
navigation system based on knowledge
mining, allowing users to search, index, mine
and evaluate the information on the network,
as well to control and manage the collection
and communication of the distributed
information. This was done with the
participation of librarians and doctoral
candidates acting as the content managers,
along with a network information resources
management system.
With the rapid developments of information
networks and globalisation, obtaining
information through networks is increasingly
difficult because of different network
platforms and information carrier structures,
as well as non-structural and dynamic
database structures (Fan and Sun, 1999).
But, at the same time, users' demand for
networked information, especially the
demands of academic researchers, are
increasing. They need authoritative
navigation and evaluation of information
resources, active and individual-oriented
information presentation services, and cross-
platform linking based on information
content.
To solve conflicts between the performance
of search and retrieve tools and the users'
requirements, information service providers
must take the responsibility to reorganise their
own network information (Lin, 2001).
Reorganisation of network information
resources consists of collection, organisation,
management and distribution of information
resources and their contents, implemented by
personnel or computer software according to
certain index modes. After reorganisation,
network information resources become more
Refereed article received 18 June 2002
Approved for publication 28 December 2002
This work is supported by the Project of Humanity
and Social Science Research of the Education
Ministry of China (No. 01JD860001). This
research was also supported by Chinese Social
Science Fund and Beijing Educational Science
Project.
 Network information resources management system
Chengyu Zhang, Ping Wang, Yi Zhao, Qiang Lai and Li Kong
structured and users have more efficient ways
to search for and find the information they
need, while the physical limitations of using
different information sources are avoided
(Zhang, 1999).
Functions and structure of NIRMS
In the NIRMS, the reorganisation of network
information resources is a cooperative and
interactive man-machine process. First of all,
content managers play a core role in the
distributed content management mechanism.
Not only do they design, lay out and build
professional resource databases, but they also
painstakingly research and mark network
resources. To help them, NIRMS provides
the content managers with convenient and
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effective tools for collecting, organising and
distributing network information resources.
Furthermore, the content managers and
NIRMS work together on knowledge mining
and resource inspection and evaluation. In the
end, the users can be provided with a
macroscopic and microcosmic view and
corresponding access mode of network
information resources through NIRMS.
The main part of NIRMS consisted of
registration modules for users at all levels,
system management and maintenance
modules for system administrators, the
resources appending and site management
modules for content managers and a resource
recommendation module for common users.
The infrastructure of NIRMS is shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1 Infrastructure of NIRMS
130
Online Information Review
Volume 27 . Number 2 . 2003 . 129-135
There are three types of participants in
NIRMS, who work as system administrators,
content managers and common users. The
system administrators are given the most
access, such as managing information about
public users and configuring the information
collected. Content managers have the
responsibility to collect, mark, organise and
release network information resources, and at
the same time, to investigate the resources
recommended by common users. Common
users can browse and review the resources
released by the NIRMS, recommend valuable
resources to content managers and provide
feedback to system administrators.
In the NIRMS, the content managers can
establish a new subject and lay out the subject
structure to organise the collected network
information resources in the field of the
subject. Every subject covers some items and
every item covers some sub-items. Each item
or sub-item can contain elements, one of
which describes a network information
resource. Content managers mark and exhibit
network resources with the metadata, which
will be explained in the next section of this
paper, examine the resources recommended
by users, and finally, release the valuable
resources onto the network. With their
academic backgrounds and the help of the
information organisation and communication
tools, content managers apply their
intelligence and knowledge to information
services in specialised fields. Their work
influences, or even decides, the quality and
depth of collecting, organising and evaluating
static and external information resources. In
addition to these tasks, content managers also
 Network information resources management system
Chengyu Zhang, Ping Wang, Yi Zhao, Qiang Lai and Li Kong
provide online answers to the users' questions
based on this platform, which makes their
expertise available to users in real time.
Network resource management
metadata
The formulation of network resources'
metadata is essential for providing reasonable
index rules to describe valuable network
resources (Lin, 2000). We defined a set of
metadata to identify, describe and locate
network resources: network resource
management metadata (NRMM) based on
the Dublin Metadata Core Element Set (DC,
2002), which considers the demands of users,
the characteristics of resources and the
system's primary functions of information
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mining resource inspection and evaluation.
The structure of NRMM is shown in Table I.
It can be seen that 14 of the 19 elements in
Table I correspond to the 14 elements
prescribed in DC. Only one element in DC,
``right'', is not mentioned in the metadata of
our system. To implement the special
functions, such as inspection, evaluation and
knowledge mining, we established five
accessional elements:
(1) Evaluation or appraisal: resources were
graded to five levels, i.e. best, better,
good, normal and bad. Content managers
graded resources according to their own
subjective judgements of the users' needs.
(2) Inspection period: five categories of periods
were assigned to resources by content
managers, i.e. never, one day, three days,
one week and one month.
(3) State of resources: resources are graded to
ten levels. 1: good, no updating; 2: good,
some updating; 3: redirecting <0.1; 4:
great change >2 or <0.5 ; 5: not
stable, disconnected once; 6: not stable,
disconnected twice; 7: not stable,
disconnected three times; 8: not
stable, disconnected four times; 9: not
useful, disconnected five times or more;
10: inspection cancelled. The two
elements ± inspection period and state of
resources ± are usually combined
automatically to evaluate resources.
(4) Clicks: this element is used to record hits.
To some extent, it shows the users'
subjective evaluation.
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Online Information Review
Volume 27 . Number 2 . 2003 . 129-135
(5) Recommender: the person who
recommends resources to the content
manager.
This metadata schema was used to describe
network information in the NIRMS. The
schema decided function characteristics, the
running mode and the general performance of
the system. Further, the metadata schema
included the layers of all the systems, which
greatly influenced information discovering,
searching, and organising processes.
Quality control of network information
resources
The quality control of network information
resources that are collected in NIRMS is
implemented by integrating manual auditing
(done by the content managers) and robotic
observation (done by the NIRMS). The
NIRMS mainly provided the robotic
observation function and quality evaluation
mechanism based on capturing the index
information automatically. When the NIRMS
finds that any sites collected by content
managers are no longer there, unreachable or
having other problems, it will give the content
managers an alert to evaluate those sites once
more.
Information resources on the Internet,
either academic or commercial sites, share the
following traits: dispersion, inconstancy,
asymmetry; and untraceability (Huang and
Guo, 2000). Network information resources
have great freedom in their establishment and
development processes, and this freedom can
be embodied by the minimal limitations on
their pattern, content and location (Kaminer,
1997). Consequently, Web sites on the
Internet are so variable that any site can be
established, updated, changed, or even closed
in a short time (Jiang, 2001). Since the
resources in NIRMS were selected from all
kinds of Web sites, especially focusing on
academic, governmental and commercial
sites, it has to inspect and evaluate their
connectedness, update frequency, availability,
timeliness and other performances.
Generally, the evaluation criteria are
divided into three parts: (1) content; (2)
visual design; and (3) framework and function
(see Figure 2). The content is the most
valuable factor for evaluating homepages and
the criteria of content evaluation included the
 Network information resources management system Online Information Review
Chengyu Zhang, Ping Wang, Yi Zhao, Qiang Lai and Li Kong Volume 27 . Number 2 . 2003 . 129-135

Table I Metadata schema (+, prerequisite element; #, only one of these attributes can be chosen)
Catalogue Element Sub-element Note
Content of resources Title Primary title Two kinds of language: Chinese and a
foreign language
Translated title
Subject Keywords
Language Chinese(simplified), Chinese(traditional),
English, other language
Description Abstract
Attached drawing
Text
Relation Is based on
Is part of
Is format of
Knowledge rights Creator Original creator
Publisher Person who describes resources
Contributor Compiler, illustrator, et al.
Recommender Person who recommends resources to
content managers
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Additional attributes Evaluate/appraise Resource graded by content managers

Inspection period Period decided by users for inspecting
the site from the resources selected
Resource state Appraisement on homepage status
based on inspection result
Clicks Hits after homepage was opened
Location The item in which resources are stored
External Coverage Access control In a university, in CERNET, in China,
attributes everywhere
Identity URL or ISBN
Date Created date
Refreshed date
Type Summary, conference, academic
organisation, dissertation database,
periodical, journal, personal Web site,
etc.
Format Size For example, 1M
Physical format Computer documents, network links,
online documents, books in libraries etc.

accuracy, authority, originality, frequency of evaluation methods of information resources

content updates, expression of content,
purpose of content provider and the target
audience. The content is fundamental for
both academic and commercial sites. The
visual design of a site is extremely important
to attract readers. In contrast with
commercial sites, most academic sites have
very plain and clean pages, including text only
in a highly organised structure to achieve high
transferring speed, and plain navigation
structures and well-designed links to give
users a good impression.
The NIRMS mainly dealt with academic
resources, focusing on content, system
function and structure for evaluation. The
132
on the Internet were divided into objective
and subjective methods. The objective
methods include robot and software real-time
measuring, while the subjective ones include
URL evaluation, modal evaluation, and
stability evaluation. The randomness of the
size and the large amount of selected
resources make it very expensive to manually
monitor these resources, so a software real-
time measuring method was used. Evaluation
parameters, such as the connection status and
extracted page patterns, were set. When the
program is running, it records the monitoring
time and the period of every monitored Web
site. The program is set to run at certain
 Network information resources management system
Chengyu Zhang, Ping Wang, Yi Zhao, Qiang Lai and Li Kong
Figure 2 Website evaluation guidelines
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times. All the monitoring results are saved in a
database. After the course of monitoring is
finished, the monitoring module sends a
message about the monitoring results to the
related content manager of the NIRMS.
Knowledge mining on the Internet
The information resources are so numerous
that content managers alone cannot
accurately and comprehensively collect
resources from the professional Web. We
tried to use some technology of knowledge
mining to collect knowledge in the Internet
automatically for content managers (Park et
al., 2001). The knowledge mining in the
NIRMS includes five steps (Zou et al., 1999):
comprehending the field of corresponding
problems; preparing a subset of related data;
discovering patterns (knowledge mining);
processing data and creating a result set; and
applying the result sets. The integration of the
auto-fetch and artificial filter (the technology
of non-structure knowledge mining) to the
NIRMS was designed to get much more
valuable information more efficiently.
In fact, the knowledge mining process in the
NIRMS was done by the cooperation
between content managers and the
data-mining module. The procedure was
as follows.
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Online Information Review
Volume 27 . Number 2 . 2003 . 129-135
Creation of a keyword list
The content managers submitted the search
keywords, in English and in Chinese, for their
subjects to the data-mining module of the
NIRMS. The keywords included the special
words of the subject, or the combination of
some restricted words. The system manager
then verified the validity of the submitted
keywords. After removing the invalid word,
system managers submitted the remaining
keywords to a data collection system.
Collection of the source documents
According to the keyword list, the NIRMS
searches the information on the WWW as a
meta search engine, which means that the
NIRMS present the keywords to some public
search engine such as Google or Yahoo, and
other search engines in China. All results were
processed to remove duplicate records, insert
new records and evaluate some of them. Then
we obtain an original result set.
Filtering information
The sorted original results from the data
collecting system (DCS) were given to the
content managers to filter and evaluate.
Valuable records were saved as result sets for
users to browse, and as sample materials for
knowledge mining. When enough sample
materials are accumulated, the NIRMS can
evaluate the searched results according to the
content of sample materials by their
 Network information resources management system
Chengyu Zhang, Ping Wang, Yi Zhao, Qiang Lai and Li Kong
similarity. By this means, NIRMS will be
taught by content managers to be more and
more intelligent.
Browsing result sets
Users accessed the information management
system to get the result sets on the WWW (see
Figure 3).
The knowledge mining of NIRMS was a
complementary blend of computers and
human intelligence. The knowledge mining
done by computers greatly released the work
of the content manager, increased the
accuracy and depth of the evaluated
information, and intelligently removed the
redundant data.
User's information feedback and
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interaction
The user's information feedback and the
interaction between the users and the system
is another important function of the NIRMS.
This function is realised through various
ways, which makes the NIRMS more
individual and intelligent.
The final purpose of navigating in network
information resources is to help the
information user by utilising various kinds of
network information resources more
effectively, and to serve the user's academic
research, teaching and studying. Between the
user and the system, as well between the
users, information communication will play
an important role. The NIRMS will offer the
following kinds of information feedback:
users' survey via the network, users' message
board, BBS, network calls and an online
Figure 3 Flow chart of knowledge
134
Online Information Review
Volume 27 . Number 2 . 2003 . 129-135
discussion area. In addition to these forums
for user feedback, the system also could
collect, organise and analyse operation
information, such as page clicks, links
followed, and searches as users navigate the
system's various functions and resources.
These kinds of information reveal the user's
requirements and interest, which makes it
possible to offer individualised service to the
users.
The users' survey, via the network, is done
by the system through offering various kinds
of questionnaires based on specific users.
The returned answers to the system's selective
questions are analysed and organised by the
system. The users' message board gives the
users a way of carrying on the information
feedback by natural language, which is
delivered to a relevant system manager or
content manager. Academic BBS offers a
non-real-time networking discussion, which
constitutes an academic community through
text information. Network calls give the users
active communication with administrators
and other users. The online discussion area is
the same as the network meeting , only in text
format. It has the benefit of real-time mutual
communication between many people.
Conclusion
NIRMS is a knowledge-mining tool, which
collects information resources from the
Internet. In addition, it can automatically
inspect the sites and search as a meta search
engine. As a core role, content managers can
use the NIRMS to mine knowledge from the
Internet. In the meanwhile, the ability of the
 Network information resources management system
Chengyu Zhang, Ping Wang, Yi Zhao, Qiang Lai and Li Kong
NIRMS to judge, evaluate or analyse the
information resources automatically will be
improved and enhanced by content
managers. So, as a knowledge-mining tool,
the NIRMS has the ability to ameliorate itself
by learning from content managers.
The rapid advance of network and
computer technology provides strong support
to the management, development, and
utilisation of library information resources,
but computers cannot replace the role of
human intelligence in the information flow.
Therefore, we must logically combine
techniques, information resources, and
human intelligence to utilise network
information resources, just as we do in the
NIRMS. This will enhance the depth and
consistency of information through providing
an environment with ordered information to
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make the best use of information resources.
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Online Information Review
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