1 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Thematic Web Portals: the case of Science and Technology Museums Vassilis Christophides Dimitris Plexousakis {christop, Institute for Computer Science - FORTH Heraklion, Crete

2 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Portalmania!

3 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Internet Portals Gateways to resources on the WWW with the aim of making information research simpler and more effective Serve communities of users by providing  Access to a broad spectrum of information and services (horizontal portals)  Access to information and services on specific subject matters (vertical or thematic portals)  Personalization in information retrieval  user interests  information filtering (viewpoints)  customizable information presentation  location-specific information  information “push” channels

4 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Elements of Comparison Horizontal PortalsThematic PortalsE-markets ScopeInternet-orientedsubject-orientedindustry-oriented Mission reference points for the general user promote access to information promote economic activity Methods voluntary registration; human or bot-driven resource collection expert selection of resources voluntary participation by companies

5 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 What is a Community Web ? A group of people sharing a domain of discourse and a set of information resources (e.g., data, documents, services) and having some common interests  Commerce, Education, Health The main requirement is to provide a single point of useful, ubiquitous comprehensive, and integrated access to various information resources  Web Portals C-Web Education Health Commerce Workplace

6 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Internet Portals Example: The Open Directory

7 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Browsing the ODP Topics

8 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Searching the ODP Topics & URLs Descriptions in ODP consist of the classification of URIs to topics, a textual description and various administrative information

9 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 ODP Search Results: Museum Spain Reina Sophia

10 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Search Engines are not Sufficient! Challenges for useful web portals  Managing several millions of distributed resources  Personalization : viewpoints  Heterogeneity of ressources  Methodology for conceptual design and deployment

11 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Document Management : actual limits Full-text indexing:  viewpoints not supported  concerns only textual resources  structure is lost Semantic indexing:  works only with controlled terminologies  concerns only text  structure is lost Typical document management :  rigid schema  no automatic indexing, limited semantic indexing based on keywords  multilingual support very costly  non-scalable

12 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Generating new knowledge Accessing knowledge from external sources Representing knowledge in documents and databases Embedding knowledge in services and processes Dissemination of knowledge within organisation Using knowledge in decision making Knowledge Processes in Corporate Communities

13 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Advanced Knowledge Schemas (ontologies, thesauri) Complexity and diversity of information resources Heterogeneous resource descriptions Community Web Portals: Main Features

14 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 What we need? Flexible Modeling of Community Web Portal Catalogs  Exploit existing forms of community knowledge  Ranging from simple vocabularies to formal ontologies  Describe in various ways heterogenous community resources  Administration, Classification, Content Rating, Channels, …. Secondary Storage Management of Portal Metadata  Large Schemas: e.g., 170 Mbytes of ODP Topics (the Art Hierarchy contains terms)  Voluminous Description Bases: e.g., 700 Mbytes of ODP indexed sites (2,342,978 URLs) Declarative Query Languages for Portal Catalogs  Interleave schema with data querying  Optimize access to Portal Catalogs

15 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 The C-Web Project Approach High-level Access to community information Archives Virtual XML Warehouse Documents Databases Web RDF  Use W3C Standards to describe (RDF/S) & exchange (XML) information  Our Main Contribution: Declarative Languages for Browsing & Querying

16 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 The C-Web Project EC IST Project (13479) Overall Aim: Set-up methodologies and infrastructure for fast deployment and easy management of Web Portals for communities requiring  effective knowledge assimilation,elicitation  efficient query answering Partners: INRIA(FR), FORTH(GR), EDW(IT) Running Application Scenario: Learning Portals for intranets or the Internet  Corporate Knowledge Servers (e.g., automobile, telecommunications)  Memory Organizations (e.g., museums, libraries, archives)  the MESMUSES Project

17 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Exploitation areas for C-Web methodology Memory organisations Science museums Education Scientific Publishing & Digital libraries Corporate Memory

18 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Building a Cultural Community Web Portal using RDF r2: museoreinasofia.mcu.es/ guernica.jpg r1: thinker.gif Portal Schema Portal Resource Descriptions ExtResource last_modified title StringDate “oil on canvas” technique exhibited “Reina Sofia Museum” title 2000/06/09 last_modified &r3 &r1 &r2 &r4 Artist Sculptor String Artifact Sculpture Painting sculpts creates fname lname paints String Museum exhibited technique String Painter paints creates &r5 &r6 fname lname paints “Pablo” “Picasso” “Rodin” 2000/01/02 last_modified r4:museoreinasofia.mcu.es r3: woman.jpg Web Resources

19 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Building Community Web Portals: Open Issues Extract Resource Metadata  Resource content descriptive metadata  Resource structure descriptive metadata  Facilitate metadata creation from community resource content Develop Specific Portal Applications for Communities  Creation of resource-based knowledge maps  Resource recommendation  Favor forms of collaboration between community members Optimize RDF Storage and Queries for Community Portals  Minimize the volume and number of created tables  Develop specific indices for class property hierarchies  Ensure scalability and performance of Portal Development Platform

20 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001

21 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Project “MESMUSES” Programme:(IST) KAIII.1.4. Multimedia Content and Tools (Access to digital collections of cultural and scientific content) Contract: IST (02/2001 – 07/2003) Partners: INRIA (France), FINSIEL - Multimedia Services (Italy), ICS-FORTH (Hellas), ENSTB - Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications - Bretagne (France), VALORIS - Group, Paris (France) IMSS - Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Firenze (Italy) CSI - Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, Paris (France) EDW International, Milano (Italy) DET-UNIFI - University of Florence (Italy)

22 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Project Summary MESMUSES aims at designing and experimenting metaphors for organizing, structuring and presenting the scientific and technical knowledge offered to the public by scientific museums. These metaphors are built upon knowledge maps which define and connect neighbouring knowledge domains. These maps enable the creation of semantic portals through which users will easily locate information relevant to their current interest, and from which they navigate either on predefined itineraries, or on new routes that they will choose freely on the map.

23 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 MESMUSES Establish and validate a methodology and the related tool for Scientific Knowledge Cartography (SKC) Choose and experiment with tools for creating “itineraries” on the knowledge landscape, to orient visitors through a real physical exhibition or a virtual one Design various tools for managing and reusing information assets Design personalisation methods to offer different itineraries on the same knowledge domains to all the categories of visitors Project Objectives

24 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Scientific and Technological Innovation l Knowledge representation in RDF The knowledge representation system will be built upon the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a general purpose formalism expressing any metadata system as a labelled directed graph. l Integration of thesauri in an ontology Many valuable hierarchies of concepts are already available in the form of thesauri. It has been demonstrated that hierarchical thesauri can be imported to specialise high-level concepts defined in an ontology represented in RDF. l XML wrapping of dynamic data sources XML wrappers will be mostly used to populate the knowledge representation System with data.

25 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001