Knowledge Portals: Ontologies at Work

specific information on the World Wide Web, thus helping their users find relevant, domain-specific information. The construction of intelligent access and the contribution of information to knowledge portals, however, remained an ad hoc task, requiring extensive manual editing and maintenance by the knowledge portal providers. To diminish these efforts, we use ontologies as a conceptual backbone for providing, accessing, and structuring information in a comprehensive approach for building and maintaining knowledge portals. We present one research study and one commercial case study that show how our approach, called SEAL (semantic portal), is used in practice.