Bringing the Semantic Web closer to the User

As the current Semantic Web (SW) activities focus mainly onmaking the Web machine understandable, the end-userneeds areoften neglected. Providing an appropriate entry point for the end-user to the technologies introduced by the SW activity would bebeneficial both for the end-usersand the SW developers. Takingadvantage of the semantic descriptions available on the SW end-users would achieve for instance much better search results and theSW developers would get a real-lifefeedback which is necessaryfor shaping and improving SW applications.To bring the advantages of the SW to the end-user, one clearlyneeds an interface which would allow the user to explore, browse,and query the content he is interested in. RDFS [1] is an acknowl-edged backbone of the SW architecture. We argue that due to itspeculiarities a new interface metaphor is needed to convey RDFS-based ontologies to the end-userin a comprehensible form. In thiswork we present such a metaphor and its implementation calledEROS