Semantic web portal: A platform for better browsing and visualizing semantic data

Abstract

One of the main shortcomings of Semantic Web technologies is that there are few user-friendly ways for displaying, browsing and querying semantic data. In fact, the lack of effective interfaces for end users significantly hinders further adoption of the Semantic Web. In this paper, we propose the Semantic Web Portal (SWP) as a light-weight platform that unifies off-the-shelf Semantic Web tools helping domain users organize, browse and visualize relevant semantic data in a meaningful manner. The proposed SWP has been demonstrated, tested and evaluated in several different use cases, such as a middle-sized research group portal, a government dataset catalog portal, a patient health center portal and a Linked Open Data portal for bio-chemical data. SWP can be easily deployed into any middle-sized domain and is also useful to display and visualize Linked Open Data bubbles. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.