OntoViews - A Tool for Creating Semantic Web Portals

This paper presents a semantic web portal tool ONTOVIEWS for publishing RDF content on the web. ONTOVIEWS provides the portal designer with a content-based search engine server, Ontogator, and a link recommendation system server, Ontodella. The user interface is created by combining these servers with the Apache Cocoon framework. From the end-user’s viewpoint, the key idea of ONTOVIEWS is to combine the multi-facet search paradigm, developed within the information retrieval research community, with semantic web RDFS ontologies, and extend the search service with a semantic browsing facility based on ontological reasoning. ONTOVIEWS is presented from the viewpoints of the enduser, architecture, and implementation. The implementation described is modular, easily modified and extended, and provides a good practical basis for creating semantic portals on the web. As a proof of concept, application of ONTOVIEWS to a deployed semantic web portal is discussed.