The world Wide Web can be considered to be a huge semistructured database that can provide us with a vast amount of information. Existing web search techniques have significant deficiencies with respect to robustness, flexibility and precision. The purpose of this research is to develop and implement a domain-specific alternative to keyword and subject directory search engines. The specific domain being considered for the prototype implementation is that of Australian universities including all the internal entities that belong to each university such as faculties, departments, schools, research centres, libraries, clubs, students, staff, publications, and related data that is available on the web. By modeling the ontology of this particular domain using a object-relational data model and restructuring the web data using a hybrid, object-relational database system such as ILLUSTRA, more complex and flexible queries can be elaorated such as summarised data, simulation of transitive closure and joins between tables.
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