International Affairs Portal: A Semantic Web Application

This paper describes a semantic portal on the domain of International Affairs. This application is an integration of several technologies in the field of the Semantic Web in a complex project. 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 portal is being deployed in the Royal Institute Elcano† (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain, which 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. The semantic portal is currently being tested by the Institute.