DC-THERA Directory, a Knowledge Management System for the support of the European Dendritic Cell Immunology Community

DC-THERA Directory is a web portal to support collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing within DC-THERA, a community focused on immunology. We show how we have faced the problem of representing and managing highly heterogeneous and interconnected knowledge. One aspect of the application interface is the search and navigation through web ontologies. Another aspect is the dynamic representation of information entities having variable sets of properties. These results have been achieved by adopting a modelling approach that combines traditional object-oriented modelling with a triple-based knowledge representation. We discuss advantages of such an approach, especially for what concerns the possible future integration of other information sources.