| Over the past decade, the rapid growth of Web communities has led to an increasing number of structured Web portals being built. With their rising popularity, the value of a general platform that developers can use to quickly build portal applications has been recognized. Although tools and systems have been developed in commercial domains, little on their design and development has been published. The goal of this dissertation is thus to explore how to design and build an efficient general platform for developing structured Web portals. Towards this goal, we first examine the capabilities of a general platform and describe its high-level architecture. Next, we study three key research challenges that often arise in building Web portals: (1) how can we analyze and revise a portal schema, which serves as a uniform interface for storing and querying portal data, to make it easier to match, (2) how can we "open up" a portal so that users can easily provide feedback to improve quality of portal data, and (3) how can the portal incorporate user feedback automatically and efficiently? Finally, we developed a general platform and deployed it to build structured Web portals for two real-world applications. We describe our implementation of the platform, conduct case studies of the applications built, and discuss the lessons learned about the utility and limitations of the platform. |
