Towards Semantic Web Portals

A web portal is a platform for information presentation and information exchange over the internet in a community of interest. In order to provide adequate facilities for communication and information sharing, web portals should utilize appropriate technologies. Current web technologies used in web portals present serious limitations regarding facilities for search, access, extraction, interpretation, and processing of information. Thus, support for information sharing and communication in web portals is confined due to limitations in the underlying technologies. Semantic Web technologies have the potential to overcome these limitations, hence utilizing them as grounding technologies will facilitate much more sophisticating web portals. Following this context, the aim of this paper is to expose the idea of Semantic Web enabled web portals. Therefore we present a wide-coverage description framework along with a criteria catalogue in order to indicate possible functional improvements as well as technical requirements for such web portals in detail. Then we relay results of a survey wherein we have examined the utilization of Semantic Web technologies in existing web portals, concluding in future requirements for the development of Semantic Web enabled web portals.