Bringing the Semantic Web closer to the User

As the current Semantic Web (SW) activities focus mainly on making the Web machine understandable, the end-user needs are often neglected. Providing an appropriate entry point for the enduser to the technologies introduced by the SW activity would be beneficial both for the end-users and the SW developers. Taking advantage of the semantic descriptions available on the SW endusers would achieve for instance much better search results and the SW developers would get a real-life feedback which is necessary for shaping and improving SW applications. To bring the advantages of the SW to the end-user, one clearly needs an interface which would allow the user to explore, browse, and query the content he is interested in. RDFS [1] is an acknowledged backbone of the SW architecture. We argue that due to its peculiarities a new interface metaphor is needed to convey RDFSbased ontologies to the end-user in a comprehensible form. In this work we present such a metaphor and its implementation called EROS.