| The Semantic Web promises to bring the World Wide Web to its full potential by standardizing the protocols for metadata. It enables a knowledge-based Web to provide a qualitatively new level of information service. It also provides intelligent access to heterogeneous, distributed information, which enables both software agents and human users to exchange information.; The main objective of this work is to demonstrate how to build a Semantic Web portal to improve information management and to use knowledge-representation, Semantic Web, and software agent technologies. To this end, this thesis presents the system architecture of an agent-based Semantic Web portal called aSWEEP. The architecture of aSWEEP consists of three major components, namely, Communicator, Knowledge Manager, and Reasoner. The aSWEEP Web portal acts as a gateway to access information of an existing and defined community on the Web, such as the Jodrey School of Computer Science at Acadia University. A prototype of this system is developed using RDF Gateway, a Semantic Web application platform. A set of ontologies representing information used by students and faculty members is described, where Resource Description Framework (RDF) and RDF Schema (RDFS) is utilized. The system allows its users to semantically browse facilities based on ontological reasoning. It also allows the user to subscribe to the latest news in the format of Rich Site Summary (RSS). |
