Managing User Focused Access to Distributed Knowledge

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.