Knowledge Portals

Knowledge portals provide views onto domainspecific information on the World Wide Web, thus helping their users find relevant, domain-specific information. The construction of intelligent access and the contribution of information to knowledge portals, however, remained an ad hoc task, requiring extensive manual editing and maintenance by the knowledge portal providers. To diminish these efforts, we use ontologies as a conceptual backbone for providing, accessing, and structuring information in a comprehensive approach for building and maintaining knowledge portals. Hence, services flourish that put up knowledge portals for a well-structured orientation on the web. Although there are some general-purpose knowledge portals such as Yahoo, the majority of knowledge portals, however, are domain-or market-specific and serve a particular clientele, for example, Look-Look, which offers structured access to trends in youth culture for companies with an interest in this market.