Semantic web portals: state-of-the-art survey

Purpose – To present the state of the arts application of semantic web technologies in web portals and corresponding achievable improvements for identifying the potential improvement made by semantic web technology. Design/methodology/approach – An evaluation scheme is proposed to investigate various web portals that make use of semantic web technologies in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses. This scheme consists of three layers: information access, information processing and grounding technologies. Two academic portals and two commercial portals are selected based on the definition of semantic web portal. Detailed evaluation based on the proposed scheme is conducted on these four select portals. Findings – Semantic web technologies can definitely increase the information consistency and the information processing quality of web portals by using ontologies to model portal structure and consensus knowledge. Furthermore, semantic web services will be acting as the key technologies to lift current portals to next level. Originality/value – This paper proposes an elaborated evaluation method for investigating various portals. It reveals the current status of semantic web applications in web portals.