Developing an ontology and folksonomy-based safe information search engine for children

There is no age limit for using the Internet anymore and children like adults have been starting to use search engines to access information. Children who met with technology at very young ages and commonly use Internet technologies have issues like adults while searching for information on the Internet; therefore, they may fail in the search process. Unlike adults, since they are in very young age groups and misunderstand some concepts, they are confronted with physical and mental problems which can affect them negatively. For this reason, the problems and experiences that children are faced with during the search process should be examined in detail and it is necessary to conduct studies for children to make them access information in a safe and correct way. By combining ontology and folksonomy structures which have considerable advantages in accessing accurate and reliable information with an information search engine, it is thought that children's need for access to information can be met. This information search engine should be developed with children and by solving the issues they are experiencing during the information search process. The purpose of this research is to develop an ontology and folksonomy-based safe information search engine for children to meet their safe and accurate information acquisition. In this study, a design based research method is used to design and develop an ontology and folksonomy-based safe information search engine to meet children's needs. The research is consist of two main phases: preliminary research where the analysis of the problem is carried out and the product phase in which the product is designed, developed and implemented, and then reflected. In this study, data were collected from students, teachers, field experts, and researcher using data from the researcher's diary, focus group interview, semi-structured interviews, validity committee meeting records, and document analysis (studies in the literature) and analyzed through content analysis. In the research; in particular, the reliability of information, the difficulty in accessing the information searched from a large number of sources, the access to irrelevant sites and irrelevant results with the searched query, the access to harmful sites, special search engines and web filters, issues with Turkish search results, not being able to select correct query expressions, the difficulty in finding keywords, writing short and simple queries, speed and information presentation issues were identified and search engine were developed along with solutions to these problems. In the context of users' statements, an ontology and folksonomy-based safe information search engine which has been developed for children has been found to be a solution to the issues faced by users in the search process in terms of information access. Keywords: Search engine, Folksonomy, Ontology, Design based research, Search engine for children