Duontology: an Approach to Semantic Portals based on a Domain and Visualization Ontology

The evolution of web portals has reached a stage where it is possible to identify canonical content that constitutes typical portals. Examples of typical content include information about the organization, product descriptions, papers, personal information, contact, etc. The Semantic Web approach, through the use of ontologies, provides several advantages for web portals. Firstly, ontologies are good candidates to formally represent the content of the portal such that software agents are able to automatically extract the information. Secondly, ontologies are interesting instruments to capture reusable information. Semantic portals allow for rich navigation, search, and export and import of external content. Although Semantic Portals are a step forward in the sense that their content is machine readable, most existing semantic portals have decreased their human readability. This is due to the fact that current approaches try to visualize the content of the ontology as it is, meaning that navigation has to follow the ontological structure, and if not, the deviation from the ontological structure is hard coded. In the duontology approach, we introduce the notion of a visualization ontology to decouple the ontology structure from its visualization. The visualization ontology allows us to separate what we see from how we see it