Too much information and too little
architecture?
- transforming semantic web ideas to IA
Svein Ølnes and Nils Arne Hove
Western Norway Research Institute

Naming things!
Gary Larson’s famous cartoon showing a man
painting names on the dog, the cat, the house in
order to ”clear up a few things”.
The drawing points to the essential naming of things
when talking about semantic structures

Content
• Background
• The problem
• Three layer architecture
• The middle layer: semantic structure (ontology)
• An intermediate solution: simple categorisations
• The optimal solution: stronger semantics
• A semantic structure modelled with Topic Maps
• Search and semantic structure
• Conclusion

Background projects
1. The development of a new portal for a local municipality
• a typical web development project
• cooperation with information architects
• semantic structures developed in parallel with interface prototypes
• a CMS provider to implement the prototypes
• the CMS not able to support the semantic structures
2. The development of a new web site for our own research institute
• semantic structure first, as the start of the work with an information
architecture
• implementation in a CMS supporting semantic structures

Municipality prototype: Good interface, but...
Information Persons
about the related to the
service service
FAQ Links
related to the related to the
service service
Menu
related to the
service
Institutions
related to the
service

... no description of the underlying structure ...
• Non-existing or too weak model of the semantic structure
• many IA projects underestimate the work with a proper semantic
structure (= an ontology)
• general lack of knowledge in this area
• the customer is not willing to pay for the extra effort, he/she wants to see
prototypes at an early stage
• The semantic structure is often not properly implemented
• most CMS’s today lack proper support for implementing semantic
structures
• the implementation is often left to the CMS provider and the customer

... creates problems for the users
Users have problems finding relevant information:
• Internal search is where the web sites often fall apart
• Internal search on web sites does not provide relevant results
• the search engine does not have enough information about the
results it presents (it does not know whether it is a person, a service,
a news article etc.)
• This problem is often solved isolated from the main problem which
is a lack of proper semantic structure
• to improve search results supplementary structures are often coded
in the search application, or “hard coding” is used to overrule the
automatic search result
• Weak semantics makes relationship between information elements
obscure
• relations must be given a description other than ”see also” or
”related article”, and the description must be obtained from the
structure

Content Management Systems
Most CMS’s:
• have poor support for semantic structures
• do not distinguish between different kinds of articles:
• all articles are treated as news and look like news
• ”when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
• do not handle different types of relations
• the only type of relations are ”related article”, “see also”
• any other type of relation must be provided by “hard-coding”
• articles often based on the same style sheet (= same attributes on
all articles)
• everything is tied to the menu
• menu structure = site architecture
• the menu is “misused” to also handle relations between articles

Three layer architecture
Standard systems Optimal solution
- only data resources - both semantic
exchangeable structure and data
resources exchangeable
Portal interface
Portal interface
including menu Menu Semantic
structure structure
Data
Data
resources
resources

The middle layer: semantic structure (ontology)
The ontology spectrum: From weak to strong semantics
(Daconta et al.: “The Semantic Web”)
1. Vocabulary
• plain text documents/HTML pages – almost no semantic
structure
2. Controlled vocabularies (weak semantic structure)
• adding metadata to the information
3. Taxonomies
• metadata and hierarchy
4. Thesauri
• metadata, hierarchy and a limited set of relations (BT, NT,
related to ...)
5. Stronger semantic structures/ontologies
• metadata, [hierarchy], any relations
Most semantic structure is presently implemented in the portal
application and thus not directly available

An intermediate solution
From no semantic structure to weak semantic structure:
• Use a semantic structure to categorise articles (= “naming things!”)
• this article is about ‘persons’ (e.g. article type = ‘person’)
• this article is about ‘projects’ etc.
• Make the internal search “aware” of the semantic structure
• this is where most of the benefit appears
• But,
• still no description of relations
• a solution that does not scale very well

Optimal solution
Stronger semantic structures/ontologies:
• Building the middle layer on standards
• semantic web standards:
• Topic Maps (ISO 13250)
• RDF/OWL (W3C recommendation)
• This will give a more flexible solution
• enables exchange of information
• reuse of both information and structure
• enables inferencing on the information
• Enables both categorisation of articles and description of
associations between different categories of articles

Middle layer modelled with Topic Maps
3 topic types/classes:
person, project and publication
3 association types/relations:
project manager, resulted in, and author of

Middle layer modelled with Topic Maps
3 topic types/classes:
person, project and publication
3 association types/relations:
project manager, resulted in/result of, and author of

Prototyping ”Research institute”
Top
Menu
Project
R manager
e
Project
l
participants
a
Project
t Publications
i
o Keywords
n
s
Funding

A Topic Maps based portal

Other portals based on semantic web
Official Norwegian governmental portal Fuzzzy.com – web 2.0/tagging
Norwegian Broadcast Company – The municipality of Bergen, Norway’s
a W3C Semantic Web Use Case second largest city

Example of search: with semantic structure

Example of search: no structure

Conclusion
• Information architects need to model stronger semantic structures
• Every web project/IA project must start with the construction of an
ontology
• Information architects must ensure that the semantic structure is
implemented in the CMS in a proper way

End of presentation
Thanks!
Contact information
Svein Ølnes – sol@vestforsk.no
Nils Arne Hove – nah@vestforsk.no