Semantic History Map: Graphs Aiding Web Revisitation Support

We present a novel approach intended to reduce user effort required to retrieve and/or revisit previously discovered information by exploiting web search and navigation history. In our approach, we collect streams of user actions during search and navigation sessions, identify individual user goals and construct and persistently store visual trees representing session history. We provide users with a History Map – a scrutable graph of semantic terms and web resources with full-text search capability over individual history entries, constructed by merging individual session history trees and the associated web resources. The Map semantically organizes a user’s browsing history (with the help of the Delicious folksonomy) and enables him to quickly recall information distributed over several documents and/or sessions. We present experimental results of session identification and also evaluate our prototype over generic web pages and as well in conjunction with our personalized faceted semantic browser Factic with promising initial results.