Summary
The growing interest and expanding efforts oriented to create metadata associated to Web resources represents an opportunity for new models of information seeking that use highly-structured metadata records as a navigation affordance. In this context, Semantic Web technology provides formal languages for the description of metadata and for the linking of such metadata elements to shared conceptualizations called ontologies. Ontologies can be used to implement user seeking moves that support different search strategies, according to Bate’s concepts. Nonetheless, many user moves require the consideration of some degree of imprecision or uncertainty that is either attributable to the ontology structure in itself or to the interpretation of the selections associated to the move by the system as a query criteria. This paper describes a collection of such fuzzy moves as a generic meta-model for the design of fuzzy concept browsers, extending previous research on ontology-based information seeking. In addition, a concrete design is provided as an illustration of the range of possible interaction designs.