An Application of Semantic Web Technologies to Enhance Content

Management in Web Information Portals

Vincenzo Orabona

, Raffaele Palmieri

, Vincenzo Moscato

, Antonio Picariello

, Salvatore D’Elena

and Donato Cappetta

Eustema Spa, via Carlo Mirabello 7, 00195, Roma, Italy

University of Naples, Federico II, DIETI, via Claudio 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy

Keywords: CMS, Semantic Web, LOD.

Abstract: As well known, Semantic Web technologies make available a set of facilities that allow data to be shared and

reused across applications. The last generation of Content Management System (CMS) can leverage such

technologies to improve the content management task incorporating semantic annotations of the produced

resources. Here, we present the benefits deriving from the application of semantic technologies in a CMS

environment. To this goal, we collect preliminary results about the effectiveness of the integration of a

semantic annotation engine within the Intrage Web Portal for content management purposes. The obtained

results show that the approach is quite promising and encourage the current research.

1 INTRODUCTION

As well known, Semantic Web technologies make

available a set of facilities for enabling

interoperability among software agents in the Web,

providing a common framework that allows data to

be shared and reused across applications. From the

other hand, the related data formats (as XML and

RDF) constitute a suitable mean to represent in a

machine understandable way the knowledge

connected to the great amount of semi-structured or

unstructured documents accessible by the Web itself.

Following the Semantic Web vision, the last

generation of Content Management System (CMS)

focuses their attention on data (information

embedded in a document) rather than content (the

document itself), thus shifting from a “content

centric” approach to a “data centric” one (Alalwan

and Weistroffer, 2012; Garcìa et al., 2008).

To this goal, they incorporate semantic annotation

modules in order to derive useful information from

the managed contents and deal with their semantics,

leveraging the Linked Data paradigm to relate

extracted concepts with the available external

knowledge (often coded in the shape of vocabularies,

taxonomies or ontologies) depending on the

considered application scenario (Dalkir, 2013).

Indeed, taxonomies, vocabularies of terms as well

as ontologies with their relationships, also represent a

valuable source for supporting the Natural Language

Processing (NLP) tools to extract information,

depending on the specific domain (Bandyopadhyay,

2012, De Virgilio et al., 2012).

In a recent paper (Cappetta et al., 2014), we

described the design and development of a novel

Semantic Content Management System (SCMS),

representing our solution to the content management

processing problem. In particular, we provided a

CMS combined with a fully featured semantic

metadata repository with reasoning capabilities.

In a preliminary stage, we are able to extract

several information from textual contents in the shape

of Schema.org “tags” through the application of a

particular NLP pipeline, thus supporting a sort of

Entity Annotation and Linking process (Sagayam et

al., 2012).

Furthermore, the tags are embedded into HTML

fragments to increase search engine performances. In

addition, domain and Linked Open Data (LOD)

ontologies (e.g. DBpedia and Geonames) are then

used to map specific terms with the related domain or

concepts by means of RDFS vocabularies.

Eventually, Ontology for Media Resources was

exploited to represent metadata of the correlated

multimedia description such as images or videos

(Amato et al., 2009).

378

Orabona V., Palmieri R., Moscato V., Picariello A., D’Elena S. and Cappetta D..

An Application of Semantic Web Technologies to Enhance Content Management in Web Information Portals.

DOI: 10.5220/0005579803780381

In Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Data Management Technologies and Applications (KomIS-2015), pages 378-381

ISBN: 978-989-758-103-8

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

The final and obtained knowledge represented by

a set of triples in the RDF format is finally stored in a

Triple Store System and a reasoning layer was built

on the top of it to produce new knowledge by using

proper inference rules (coded in the SWRL format).

An internal search engine has been developed to

index extracted data and their URI, supporting

semantic retrieval by means of query expansion and

query by example (based on a notion of Document

Similarity) mechanisms. Another functionality of our

semantic engine is the Document Classification,

where related topics are listed in a proper taxonomy.

Summarizing, in the following list we report the

features offered by the developed system:

1. Entity Extraction: extraction of entities

belonging to particular classes from a text;

2. Conceptualization: extracting semantic concepts

from texts, summarizing the analyzed content;

3. Classification: classification of structured (for

example contained in a database) and

unstructured information with respect to a

reference model, such as a taxonomy, supported

by inference mechanisms, also, and not purely

keyword-based;

4. Relations Extraction: ability in automatically

relations between concepts reported in a given

text;

5. Language Detection: capability of identifying

the language used in a text;

6. Document Similarity: given a document (e.g.

an image) or a portion of text, the capability of

recommending similar resources to the target one

based on the analysis of their contents;

7. Query expansion: expanding the initial

keyword used to search documents, with a set of

“related terms” (extracted from the available

ontologies);

8. Linked Open Data: linking the extracted

entities to public datasets to facilitate the search

of documents from the Web and to improve

ranking in search engines.

The reference architecture with all the imple-

mentation details are reported in (Cappetta et al.,

2014).

In this work, we want to report an application of

the described SCMS to a real case study: the Intrage

Portal. In particular, our aim is to show the

advantages related to the application of semantic

technologies for managing contents within a Web

Information Portal.

2 THE INTRAGE PORTAL

The Intrage Web Portal (http://www.intrage.it/) was

created to help “over 50” people to fulfill all those

needs concerning with their life and to have some

suggestions about future issues such as: retirement

and social assistance.

More in details, the topics provided with the

Intrage Portal are: jobs, retirements, health,

insurance, taxation, social welfare, homelife,

consumer (Figure 1 shows the related home page).

On line since 16 June 2000, we have published

more than 100,000 contents among pages of news,

analytical services, special articles and interviews.

During these years, the web site has received about

100 million of visits and 300 million of page views.

Moreover, it annually produces 4,000,000 newsletter

and more than 12,000 lonely hearts have published

their cards in the section “Soul Mate”.

Figure 1: Home Page of the Intage Portal.

Intrage experience was reported by about 100

newspapers (national daily newspapers, periodicals

and on-line news sites) and by several television

networks, with more than 280 assets between articles

and interviews.

In the following, we briefly describe how we have

used our SCMS to improve the management of the

contents within the portal.

The first and fundamental step to enable the

relevant information extraction and correct content

classification functionalities is the definition of a

domain ontology for over 50 people interests.

In the specific case of Intrage, the ontology has

been represented by a SKOS taxonomy, given the

large variety of the available concepts. The elements

useful to populate the taxonomy, were collected

starting from the thematic channels already provided

by the web portal. Such elements constitute the “top”

concepts, and were enriched with other concepts

provided by the Nuovo Soggettario taxonomy,

published by the Library of Florence

(http://thes.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/).

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Eventually, particular SKOS propertieshave been

used properties to link the different concepts, together

with some references to Wikipedia.

Successively, the discussed entity annotation and

linking process was activated to create the final

System Knowledge Base in according to the LOD

paradigm (Amato et al., 2012). Semantic retrieval

facilities are finally available to find contents of

interest both for editing and browsing/searching aims.

In the Figure 2, we report a fragment of the adopted

SKOS taxonomy.

Figure 2: SKOS taxonomy.

3 OBTAINED ADVANTAGES

In the following, we summarize all the main

advantages derived by the application of semantic

technologies to the content management problem for

the proposed case study.

1. To Facilitate the Content Editing task through

the suggestion of similar previously published

content, during the production step – When

new contents are generates some facilities are

provided to users suggesting previously

published contents with “similar” keywords or

topics. Thus, the editor has the possibility to link

to other sources and verify the “originality” of

what is being produced.

2. To Improve Content Annotation through the

suggestion of a set of metadata and tags

automatically extracted from the content itself

– In addition to Named Entity Recognition (NER)

utilities, our system provides on the base of a

statistical analysis of the text a set of metadata

and tags that can be useful to describe a content.

This information is then exploited in the indexing

stage for creating an index of terms.

3. To improve the “visibility” of the published

pages by injecting in the HTML code

particular tags for search engines – In the

Content Editor tool, the annotation results

obtained from the text are integrated as

microdata within the HTML page, using

additional span tags. These annotations are built

by reusing the standard vocabulary Schema.org.

Since search engines are able to process this

additional information, and exploit them in the

results they produce, they can apply higher rating

criteria for pages containing this data, increasing

their visibility;

4. To Provide effective search mechanisms for

content produced by both editors and final

users, allowing to perform queries according

to criteria used in the information extraction

stage – During the production of new contents, a

tool is provided for users to determine correlated

articles in the Knowledge Base. In the search

phase, users can browse contents using the index

of terms and exploit relations among ontology

concepts for improving search results.

5. To Increase Revenue derived by the

advertising content through its

contextualization in web pages - For this

purpose, we used a contextual taxonomy

composed by two levels for the categorization of

content, defined by the IAB Association

(www.iab.it).

6. To Enhance User Experience using content

recommendation facilities, based on user

profile (favourite pages, subscribed channels,

etc.) - All recommendation systems exploit user

profiles to provide suggestions about contents

related to particular topics, concepts or entities

Amato et al., 2014; Moscato et al., 2013). For the

Intrage Portal, content recommendation is

implemented in “My Home” section, where user

can view targeted recommendation boxes. These

are determined by an ad-hoc algorithm, which

assigns a particular score to contents of interest

on the base of user feedbacks about followed

channels, favourite tags, etc.

4 PRELIMINARY EVALUATION

We have to try to “measure” the introduced benefits

for final users derived from the application of

semantic technologies to a CMS environment. In

particular, measurements have been performed to

“quantify” the effective utility of the discussed

advantages.

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To this aim, for each benefit we have defined a

particular indicator using a “5 five stars” rating. The

following table summarizes the obtained results.

Table 1: Preliminary Results.

In particular, the Table shows the introduced best

practices related to the use of semantic technologies,

the expected results and, finally, the measured score

combing human dependent and objective criteria.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this work, we described an application of Web

Semantic technologies to the content management

problem for Web Information Portal, reporting a real

case study: the Intrage Portal.

We listed the possible benefits in the content

production and search, trying to measure their range

for the discussed case study.

Future work will be devoted to enhance user

profiling using clustering and co-clustering

techniques, and content recommendation exploiting

hybrid strategies taking into account also the features

of suggested items.

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