Enhancement of “Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution” Approach for Evaluating the Web Sources to Select as External Source for Web Warehousing

Abstract

The main concern of this paper is to evaluate the web sources, which are to be selected as external data sources for web warehousing. In order to identify the web sources, they are evaluated on the ground of their multiple features. For it, Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach has been used. Here, among all the MCDM approach, the focus is on “Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution” (TOPSIS) approach and proposing an enhancement in this method. The conventional TOPSIS approach uses Euclidean Distance to measure the similarity. Here, Jeffrey Divergence has been proposed to measure the similarity instead of Euclidean Distance which includes all the symmetric distances during computation. The Euclidean Distance only measures unidirectional distance whereas the Jeffrey Divergence includes multidirectional distances. Unidirectional distance includes only distance in one dimension but multidirectional distances includes differences, so more relevant in web sources evaluation. Experimental analysis for both the variations of TOPSIS approach have been conducted and the result shows the enhancement in the selection of web sources.