A simple fuzzy extension to the search of documents on the Web

The growth of documents on the web can show all its positive sides only if, in the search operation, a user can find easily what he needs (structure, format and contents). A solution is to give semantic meanings to web documents, trying to interpret the users' wishes, possibly expressed through a user's well known language. In this paper we introduce a linguistic variant of standard meta-data types. Using type 2 fuzzy sets, we associate a linguistic value with each meta-in formation, then represent a user profile and introduce a matching system to select the most compatible documents with the profile. This method can be considered as an extension of Boolean search on the web, where the results can be classified and ordered according to users' needs.