Knowledge Portals
Dr. Steffen Staab
Senior Researcher and Lecturer
Knowledge Management Group
Applied Computer Science Institute (AIFB)
University of Karlsruhe, Germany
sst@aifb.unikarlsruhe.de
www.aifb.unikarlsruhe.de/ sst
Knowledge portals provide views onto domainspecific information on the World
Wide Web, thus facilitating their users to find relevant, domainspecific informa-
tion. The construction of intelligent access and the provisioning of information to
knowledge portals, however, remained an ad hoc task requiring extensive manual
editing and maintenance by the knowledge portal providers. In order to diminish
these efforts we use ontologies as a conceptual backbone for providing, accessing
and structuring information in a comprehensive approach for building and main-
taining knowledge portals. We have built several experimental and one commercial
knowledge portal for knowledge management tasks such as skill management and
corporate history analysis that show how our approach is used in practice. This
practice, however, has exhibited a number bottlenecks, many of which could be
avoided or at least diminished by Human Language Technology. We have used
HLT in order to reduce the costs of ontology engineering and in order to narrow
the gap between finding knowledge in texts and providing it to the portal.
