291 3 rd International Conference on Research and Innovation in Information Systems – 2013 (ICRIIS’13) Web Information Gathering Processes for Gold and Silver Price Information Norliza Katuk*, Nur Haryani Zakaria, Afiq Aisamuddin Mohd. Shariff, Abdullah Al-Ghushami, and Muhammad Hilmi Yusoff School of Computing Universiti Utara Malaysia 06010 UUM Sintok Kedah, Malaysia * Corresponding email: k.norliza@uum.edu.my Abstract- This paper presents a research on product-specific web information gathering concept that intends to improve web searching through conventional search engines. Search engines are useful for searching general information; however, the results are not always accurate because they return the results based on key-words occurrences, but not accurateness. Further, users must filter and organize the information accordingly to make the information meaningful. Users must also visit multiple websites independently to check whether the information is relevant. These processes are tedious and very time consuming especially for users who search for specific products information. Hence, we propose a web information gathering model that aims to provide a standard for developing product-specific web searching tools. It was applied in a mobile application called Gold-Trader. The mobile application provides gold and silver prices information to individual or personal traders. It can help individual or personal traders to monitor and compare gold and silver prices from multiple websites without the needs to visit them individually. Keywords—gold trading, gold price, decision making, information gathering, mobile application I. INTRODUCTION The World Wide Web (www) contains massive amount of information about almost everything in the world. It creates a new phenomenon called “information overload” in the Internet [1]. Simply said, Internet users receive too much information today that causes difficulty to search, filter, choose and organize the right one for them. Although search engines are available to help users to search information in the Internet, they only provide unstructured information that is mostly based on key-words search. Users must go through each of the search results and filter them according to their needs. This is very time- consuming tasks especially for those who search for business-related information. The best approach to overcome this phenomenon is through the use of personalized tools that can help users to search, filter and organize information that is truly relevant to their needs. In the context of commodities trading, information on market price updates is always valuable for individual traders. Unlike professional traders that use specific software to monitor commodity market price updates, individual traders are often rely on the unstructured information from the Internet. A trade research analyst, David Bromley [2] highlighted that traders participating in commodity markets are mostly private individuals who do not own specific software to help them in their business operations. Searching and browsing for commodity prices from the Internet are their main task to keep the businesses run. Many of them failed because of ineffective information searching and lack of knowledge and skill in information and communication technology (ICT). Hence, software tools that can assist individual commodity traders on the market price updates are highly needed and certainly benefit them in running their businesses. In this paper, we present our work on developing a mobile application for individual traders to monitor market price updates for gold and silver commodities. Firstly, in Section II, we explain the concept of web information gathering, and how it can be adapted as a generic information gathering model for the selected domain of application. In Section III, we describe the methodology and implementation of the information gathering model in a real-time mobile application for gold and silver price updates known as Gold-Trader. Then, Section IV discusses the benefits and limitations of the systems. The conclusion and future works are provided in Section V of this paper. II. WEB INFORMATION GATHERING With advances in Internet technology, the web is a rapid source for obtaining information. However, the amount of information in the web is continually growing and has caused information overload. Too much information is available for users that caused difficulty to them to search, filter and select the best information that fulfil their needs. Normal Internet users use search engines to search information that they need. We all acknowledge that search engines play important roles in retrieving web contents for users. However, it only provides partial assistance, as users have to filter the web contents from the results and organize the information in a separate document either in word processing software or on a paper. The above processes that users carried out in searching, filtering, organizing and presenting web information is described as a web information gathering process. Simple examples of information gathering include Internet users who intent to travel abroad, students who do their review assignments, and customers who search for a product to buy. In general users perform information gathering to acquire useful and meaningful information from the web [3]. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by UUM Repository