WEASEL: Vodafone Corporate Semantic Web

Abstract

The 2006 Gartner emerging technology curve highlights the relevance of the Corporate Semantic Web as one of the most promising IT areas in the next five years. The work presented herein describes WEASEL, an initiative funded by Vodafone to apply and evaluate such technology in the context of a large multinational company. This scenario comprises a number of heterogeneous web sites containing unstructured and related, but physically decoupled, information which needs common models that provide unified ways of representing information across the different sources, i.e. ontologies. Three main milestones were defined for WEASEL: the creation of a domain ontology, the extraction of information from the different sources and its semantic annotation and aggregation, and the creation of a new web site containing a semantic search engine which provides natural interfaces for retrieving the aggregated information. WEASEL concluded with its evaluation by Vodafone.