A Semantic Portal for the International Affairs Sector
Contreras J.1, Benjamins V.R1, Blázquez M1, Losada S1, Salla R1, Sevilla, J1,
Navarro D.1, Casillas J.1, Mompó A.1, Patón D.1, Corcho O.1, Tena P.2, Martos I2
1Intelligent Software Components, S.A., www.isoco.com
{rbenjamins, jcontreras}@isoco.com
2Real Instituto Elcano, www.realinstitutoelcano.org
pilar.tena@r-i-elcano.org
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.
1. Introduction
Worldwide there are several prestigious institutes that comment on the political
situation in the world, such as the UK’s Royal Institute for International Affairs
(www.riia.org), the Dutch Institute for International Relations (www.clingendael.nl).
In Spain, the Real Instituto Elcano (Royal Institute Elcano,
www.realinstitutoelcano.org) is fulfilling this role. The institute provides several
types of reports where they discuss the political situation in the world, with a focus on
events relevant for Spain. The reports are organized in different categories, such as
Economy, Defense, Society, Middle East, etc. In a special report - the “Barometer of
the Royal Institute Elcano” - the Institute comments on how the rest of the world
views Spain in the political arena. Access to the content is provided by categorical
navigation and a traditional full text search engine. While full text search engines are
helpful instruments for information retrieval (www.google.com is the champion), in
domains where relations are important, those techniques fall short. For instance, a
keyword-based search engine will have a hard time to find the answer to a question
such as: “Governments of which countries have a favorable attitude toward the US-

† Juan Sebastian Elcano was a famous Spanish sailor, a first seaman who ever made the
complete circuit of the globe

led armed intervention in Iraq?” since the crux of answering this question resides in
“understanding” the relation “has-favourable-attitude-toward”.

In this paper we describe a project whose aim was to provide semantic access to
content available in the portal of the Elcano Institute. With semantics, we mean here
meaning related to the domain of International Affairs. In other words, we aim to
construct an island of the Semantic Web for the International Affairs sector.

In order to construct this Semantic Web Island, we use an approach, tools and
techniques that are being developed in the context of several European and National
R&D projects [1]. Components include:
• A domain ontology (in this case an ontology of International Affairs)
• An automatic annotator (metadata generator), called Knowledge Parser®
• A semantic search engine with a natural language interface, as well as a forms-
based interface
• A publication tool for publishing semantic content on the web –Duontology®-,
enabling semantic navigation including a 3D visualization tool

In Section 2, we describe the ontology of the International Relations domain. Section
3 details how we populate the ontology with instances, and how we establish relations
between the current content of the Elcano Institute and the (instances of the) ontology.
Then, in Section 4, we explain our approach (Duontology®) to publish the semantic
content in a semantic web portal providing a semantic search engine. Section 5
concludes the paper.
2. An Ontology of International Affairs
2.1. Ontology
An ontology is a shared and common understanding of some domain that can be
communicated across people and computers [6, 7, 3, and 8]. Ontologies can therefore
be shared and reused among different applications [5]. An ontology can be defined as
a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization [6, 3].
“Conceptualization” refers to an abstract model of some phenomenon in the world by
having identified the relevant concepts of that phenomenon. “Explicit” means that the
type of concepts used, and the constraints on their use are explicitly defined. “Formal”
refers to the fact that the ontology should be machine-readable. “Shared” reflects the
notion that an ontology captures consensual knowledge, that is, it is not private to
some individual, but accepted by a group. An ontology describes the subject matter
using the notions of concepts, instances, relations, functions, and axioms. Concepts in
the ontology are organized in taxonomies through which inheritance mechanisms can
be applied. It is our experience that especially the social part for building a commonly
agreed ontology is not easy [2].