Experience of the semantic technologies use for intelligent Web encyclopedia creation (on example of the Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia portal)

Abstract

We consider the conceptual principles of the Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia development and analyze the main advantages of its portal version – e-VUE. This portal version requires the relevant technological platform with high-level expressiveness and efficiency. Development of e-VUE with complex knowledge structure causes the study of modern Web-technologies and matching their capabilities with the specific requirements of encyclopedia. Therefore we consider in details the project idea and purposes, the specifics of e-VUE information representation (number and volume of articles, content types and sources, relations between content elements and their properties, business processes of article publication, design requirements) and processing (navigation, requests, integration and matching means) to estimate the Wiki-technology feasibility use (namely - opportunities and restrictions of MediaWiki technological platform). Also attention is paid to the means of information security ensuring and semantic-based establishment of content access rights. The results of such analysis show that MediaWiki with semantic plugins can be used as a base for e-VUE portal construction but needs in extension of its functionality based on modern knowledge management tools and formats of their interoperable representation. Now we are oriented on use of ontological analysis and Semantic Web standards (OWL, RDF, SPARQL). In terms of the Semantic Web, e-VUE is a distributed database with heterogeneous types of information objects that can be used both by humans and by external software (e.g. by intelligent agents). The main principles of e-VUE knowledge base organization are grounded on Wiki categories and semantic properties of Semantic MediaWiki that are used for formal representation of the e-VUE typical information objects (TIO). Such approach allows to express TIO relations, properties and characteristics that can be used by logical inference and semantic retrieval to improve the navigation between portal elements and integration of data from various Wiki pages.