WEB PORTALS

WEB PORTALS

WEB PORTALS

Explain why this is an important topic to know about, the history/current state of the issue

This is an important topic to know about the issue because the foremost power of the world broad web is that effectively every individual who owns a computer may assist high-value data -- the genuine dispute is to make precious data be found. Obviously, this dispute can not only be accomplished by centralized services, since the treatment of even the most mighty crawling and indexing appliances has shrunk in the last couple of years in periods of percentage of the number of world broad web sheets accessible on the web. This entails that a correct answer to this dilemma should rather be searched along a standard paradigm of the WWW, viz. self-organization. (Altmann 1999)

 

Self-organization does not necessarily mean automatic, machine-driven organization. Rather, from the very beginning communities of interest have formed on the web that covered what they deemed to be of interest to their group of users in -- what we here call -- community web portals. Community web portals are similar to Yahoo and its likes by their goal of presenting a structured view onto the web, however they are dissimilar by the way knowledge is provided in a collaborative process with only few resources (manpower, money) for maintaining and editing the portal. Another major distinction is that community web portals count in the millions, since a large percentage, if not the majority, of web or intranet sites is not maintained by a central department, but rather by a community of users. Strangely enough, technology for supporting communities of interest has not quite kept up with the complexity of the tasks of managing community web portals. A few years ago such a community of interest would have comparatively few sources of information to consider. Hence, the overall complexity of (Benjamins 1999) managing this task was low. Now, with so many more people participating a community portal of only modest size may easily reach the point where it appears to be more of a jungle of interest rather than a convenient portal to start from. (Berners 1999)

This problem gave us reason to reconsider the techniques for managing community web portals. We observed that a successful web portal would weave loose pieces of information into a coherent presentation adequate for sharing knowledge with the user. On the conceptual, knowledge sharing, level we have found that Davenport and Prusak's maxime [Davenport & Prusak1998], "people can't share knowledge if they don't speak a common language'', is utterly crucial for the case of community web portals. The only difference to Davenport and Prusak's thoughts derives from the fact that knowledge need not only be shared between people, but also between people and machines. (Chaudri 1998 )

At this point, ontologies and intelligent reasoning come in as key technologies that allow knowledge sharing at a conceptually concise and elaborate level. These AI techniques support core concerns of the "Semantic Web'' ...