Integrating a Wiki in an Ontology Driven Web Site: Approach, Architecture and Application in the Archaeological Domain

This paper describes an approach to the design and implementation of ontology driven dynamic web sites combining ontologies and wiki technologies. The core of the architectural solution proposed is completely based on ontologies rather than on more traditional forms of persistent data storage facilities, such as relational databases. This approach provides a flexible support to the design and implementation of web portals in which navigation schemes are not entirely predetermined but are instead influenced by actual relationships among the contents of the ontology, that are used to generate web pages as well as hyperlinks. A wiki technology is integrated with this approach in order to create pages not directly derived by elements of the ontology, but also to enrich the textual contents with suitable formatting, images and hyperlinks. The application of this approach to the realization of a web portal is also described; the portal is devoted to enable a number of scientific communities to share archaeological knowledge about the Silk Road domain.