An Infrastructure for Building Semantic Web Portals

Lei, Dr. Yuangui and Lopez, Miss Vanessa and Motta, Prof. Enrico (2006) An Infrastructure for Building Semantic Web Portals. In Proceedings International Workshop on Web Information Systems Modeling (WISM 2006).

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One important task of semantic web portals is to offer both end users and applications a seamless access to knowledge contained in heterogeneous data sources in specific user communities. As such it is important to ensure that i) high quality metadata are extracted from heterogeneous sources in an automated manner and ii) comprehensive querying facilities are provided thus nabling knowledge to be accessed as easily as possible. However, current semantic web portals have only marginally addressed these issues. In this paper, we present our work, the KMi semantic web portal infrastructure, which pays special attention to these issues. Central to our infrastructure are three components: i) an automated metadata extraction tool, ASDI, which supports the extraction of high quality metadata from heterogeneous sources, ii) an ontology-driven question answering tool, AquaLog, which makes use of the domain specific ontology and the semantic metadata extracted by ASDI to answers questions in natural language format, and iii) a semantic search engine, which enhances traditional text-based searching by making use of the underlying ontologies and the extracted metadata. A semantic web portal application has been built, which illustrates the usage of this infrastructure.

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