Multiple Vehicles for a Semantic Navigation Across Hyper-environments

The Web, but also for example a large extra-net such as a digital library, has an intricate topology that makes navigation through resources a tricky task. The mere introduction of Semantic Web technologies won’t automatically solve this task, because the Semantic Web only promotes machine understandability of Web resources by explicitly providing a thick bunch of annotations, thus leaving their interpretation and use to the application. In this paper, we refer to such difficult-to-navigate open information systems as hyper-environments and we compare the interaction with a hyper-environment to a journey in which users are travelers and the aim of the journey is to find useful information. We therefore propose a Semantic Navigation Engine that aims at helping Web travelers in traversing hyper-environments by giving them proper tools (called vehicles in the travel metaphor) that can help them in getting oriented and fulfilling their aims.