Managing User Focused Access to Distributed Knowledge

Rudi Studer (Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies and Ontoprise GmbH, Germany)

York Sure (Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany)

Raphael Volz (Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe and FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany)

Abstract: Community web sites exhibit the property that multiple content providers exist. Of course, any portal is only as useful as the quality and amount of its content. Developing original content is time consuming and expensive. To offset the cost, we present a novel framework, viz. SEAL (SEmantic portAL), that builds on Semantic Web standards. We illustrate our approach with examples from the OntoWeb community portal. Community web sites exhibit two dominating properties: They often need to integrate many different information sources and they require an adequate web site management system. SEAL exploits ontologies for fulfilling the requirements set forth by these two properties. Ontologies provide a high level of sophistication for web information integration as well as for web site management.

Keywords: information integration, knowledge portal, ontology

Categories: H.0