Semantic navigation with VIeWs

The paper describes VIeWs, a system that combines ontologies, web-based information extraction, and automatic hyperlinking to enrich web documents with additional relevant background information. The central idea behind VIeWs is to demonstrate how web portals can be dynamically tailored to special interest groups by use of corresponding ontologies. As a particular use case we developed an application for the "saarland.de" web portal of the Saarland region in Germany, which we present here in some detail. The paper describes the ideas behind the system and the Saarland.de application and provides an overview of the system architecture and components. Additionally, next to a comparison with related work, also some discussion on end user aspects of the application and its connection to the Semantic Web is given. It is argued that VIeWs is a typical end user application that depends on ontologies as semantic models for different scenarios, but that the need for Semantic Web technology beyond this has not been proven yet.