A Semantic Portal for the International Affairs Sector

Abstract

The Royal Institute Elcano † (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. The online content can be accessed by navigating through categories or by a keyword-based, full text search engine. The work described in this paper aims at improving access to the content. We describe an approach, tools and techniques that allow building a semantic portal, where access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. The approach comprises an automatic ontology-based annotator, a semantic search engine with a natural language interface, a web publication tool allowing semantic navigation, and a 3D visualization component. The semantic portal is currently being tested by the Institute.

A Semantic Portal for Fund Finding in the EU: Semantic Upgrade, Integration and Publication of Heterogeneous Legacy Data

“…The description of another similar application can be found at [4], and other commercial applications are being also developed with this toolset at the time of writing this paper. By providing a toolset for the upgrade of legacy content to the Semantic Web and some hints on how to exploit the upgraded knowledge we strongly believe that we will allow others to implement other similar applications as well, hence fostering the vision of the Semantic Web.…”

“…In these documents this information is usually available in natural language or in a semi-structured form (normally in the form of a bullet list where the types of necessary documentation are listed). R 2 O and ODEMapster cannot be used for this purpose, and hence we used iSOCO's 5 Knowledge Parser® [4], an automatic annotation system able to parse unstructured or semi-structured content, extract knowledge from it and populate it in an ontology. Figure 3 shows how the task of integrating the information coming from the different sources is performed.…”

“…One example of such portal, at the regional level, is the public Website of CIDEM 4 , which is a non-profit Catalan organisation that aims at improving the region's industrial community networks and at increasing their competitiveness. This Website contains information about funding opportunities gathered, manually and on a daily basis, by CIDEM's staff members from different sources (mainly official publications).…”

Semantically enhanced Information Retrieval: An ontology-based approach

“…But there are limits to the extent to which knowledge can be formalized in this way. The so-called semantic portals (Contreras, et al, 2004;Maedche, Staab, Stojanovic, Studer & Sure, 2003) and ontology-based Question Answering systems (Bernstein & Kaufmann, 2006;Cimiano, Haase & Heizmann, 2007) are examples of this approach.…”

“…The concepts and instances in the KB are linked to the documents by means of explicit, non-embedded annotations of the documents. Since we do not address the problem of knowledge extraction from text (Contreras, et al, 2004;Dill, et al, 2003;Handschuh, Staab & Ciravegna, 2002;Kiryakov, Popov, Terziev, Manov & Ognyanoff, 2004;Popov, Kiryakov, Ognyanoff, Manov & Kirilov, 2004), we provide a vocabulary and some simple mechanisms to aid in the semi-automatic annotation of documents, once ontology instances have been created (manually or automatically).…”