1 ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001 Thematic Web Portals: the case of Science and Technology Museums Vassilis Christophides Dimitris Plexousakis {christop, dp}@ics.forth.gr.

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ICS-FORTH Athens, June 2001

Thematic Web Portals: the case of Science and Technology Museums

Vassilis Christophides Dimitris Plexousakis {christop, dp}@ics.forth.gr

Institute for Computer Science - FORTH

Heraklion, Crete

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Portalmania!

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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

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Elements of Comparison

Horizontal Portals Thematic Portals E-markets

Scope Internet-oriented subject-oriented industry-oriented

Missionreference points for the general user

promote access to information

promote economic activity

Methodsvoluntary registration; human or bot-driven resource collection

expert selection

of resources

voluntary

participation by companies

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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

HealthCommerce

Workplace

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Internet Portals Example: The Open Directory

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Browsing the ODP Topics

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Searching the ODP Topics & URLs

Descriptions in ODP consist of the classification of URIs to topics, a textual description and various administrative information

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ODP Search Results: Museum Spain Reina Sophia

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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

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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

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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

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Advanced Knowledge Schemas

(ontologies, thesauri)

<tag1> <tag2> <tag3></tag1>

<tag1> <tag2> <tag3></tag1>

Complexity and diversity

of information resources

Heterogeneous

resource descriptions

Community Web Portals: Main Features

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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 25315 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

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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

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The C-Web Project

EC IST Project (13479) 1999-2000 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

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Exploitation areas for C-Web methodology

Memory organisations

Science museums

Education

Scientific Publishing &

Digital libraries

CorporateMemory

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Building a Cultural Community Web Portal using RDF

r2: museoreinasofia.mcu.es/guernica.jpg

r1:www.rodin.fr/thinker.gif

PortalSchema

PortalResourceDescriptions

ExtResource

last_modified title

StringDate

“oil on canvas”technique

exhibited

“Reina Sofia Museum”

title2000/06/09

last_modified

&r3

&r1

&r2

&r4

Artist

Sculptor

StringArtifact

Sculpture

Painting

sculpts

createsfname

lname

paints

StringMuseum

exhibited

techniqueStringPainter

paints

creates

&r5

&r6

fname

lname

lname

paints

“Pablo”

“Picasso”

“Rodin”

2000/01/02last_modified

r4:museoreinasofia.mcu.esr3:www.artchive.com/woman.jpg

Web Resources

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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

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Project “MESMUSES”Programme:(IST) KAIII.1.4. Multimedia

Content and Tools (Access to digital collections of cultural and scientific content)

Contract: IST-2000-26074 (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)

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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.

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MESMUSES

Establish and validatea methodology and therelated tool for Scientific

Knowledge Cartography (SKC)

Choose and experiment withtools for creating “itineraries”on the knowledge landscape, to orient visitors through a realphysical exhibition or a virtual one

Design various tools for managingand reusing information assets

Design personalisationmethods to offer different itineraries on the sameknowledge domains to all the categories of visitors

Project Objectives

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Scientific and Technological Innovation

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.

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.

XML wrapping of dynamic data sources

XML wrappers will be mostly used to populate the knowledge representation System with data.

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