The People’s Portal: Ontology Management on Community Portals

The Semantic Web will never be a reality unless the quantity of Semantic Web pages significantly increases. Our thesis is that enlargement of the Semantic Web content is possible and effective by acquisition of ontological structures from human users of community Semantic Web portals. An important aspect of the proposed approach is that ontology structure acquisition from humans takes place merely by the portal exploitation without significant effort from the user side. We describe the People’s portal environment that motivates and allows the People’s portal users to develop, populate and share ontologies, define the ways to manage the content on the community Semantic Web portals, and to reach dynamic consensus on the basis of heterogeneous ontologies. This work contributes to overcoming the limitations of the existing web portals by specifying and prototyping the People’s portal environment, i.e., a framework for user-driven community Semantic Web portals.