Technology of ontology building for knowledge portals on humanities

Abstract

The paper presents a technology of ontology building for specialized Internet portals providing content-based access to scientific knowledge and information resources related to humanities. The information basis for such portals is formed by ontologies, which allows heterogeneous data and knowledge to be presented in a unified manner ensuring their relatedness. Based on the ontology, internal storages of the portal data are constructed and management of its information content, as well as navigation and search, are organized. To meet the portal objectives, the ontology should be well-structured and adequately present its problem and subject domains. Therefore the portal ontology is divided into the domain-independent ontologies and subject domain ontology. The technology of ontology building includes the methods of ontology building, the ontology description language and ontology editor. The methods of ontology building are defined by its structure and supported by the facilities of the ontology editor. The ontology description language and ontology editor are selected and designed in such a way that they are easy to understand and use for experts in humanities. The ontology editor is also designed taking into account its use in the distributed development of ontologies. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.