Web-pages annotation and adaptability. A semantic portal on the International Space Station

The paper describes a methodological approach to design and develop a semantic portal by retrieving unstructured information from different Web sites on the Net. Such a method is applied to the International Space Station (ISS) knowledge domain, but it proves to be quite general and domain independent. The development of a domain specific ontology, on which the semantic portal is based, allows to annotate and classify the unstructured information available in heterogeneous formats (natural language texts, photos, videos,) on different Web sites, the annotated information becoming instances of the ontology’s classes and attributes. The ontology has been developed using Ontoedit. The Portal has a client-server architecture based on the middleware layer of Ontobroker. Queries from Web pages are formulated using FLORID, a Frame Logic syntax based language. PHP language is in charge to manage user requests from the Portal Web page and the replies of Ontobroker server.