Design and implementation of contextual information portals

This paper presents a system for enabling offline web use to satisfy the information needs of disconnected communities. We describe the design, implementation, evaluation, and pilot deployment of an automated mechanism to construct Contextual Information Portals (CIPs). CIPs are large searchable information repositories of web pages tailored to the information needs of a target population. We combine an efficient classifier with a focused crawler to gather the web pages for the portal for any given topic. Given a set of topics of interest, our system constructs a CIP containing the most relevant pages from the web across these topics. Using several secondary school course syllabi, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our system for constructing CIPs for use as an education resource. We evaluate our system across several metrics: classification accuracy, crawl scalability, crawl accuracy and harvest rate. We describe the utility and usability of our system based on a preliminary deployment study at an after-school program in India, and also outline our ongoing larger-scale pilot deployment at five schools in Kenya.