Towards Integrative Enterprise Knowledge Portals Torsten Priebe Department of Information Systems University of Regensburg D-93040 Regensburg, Germany torsten.priebe@wiwi.uni-regensburg.de Günther Pernul Department of Information Systems University of Regensburg D-93040 Regensburg, Germany guenther.pernul@wiwi.uni-regensburg.de ABSTRACT Knowledge portals make an important contribution to enabling enterprise knowledge management by providing users with a consolidated, personalized user interface that allows efficient access to various types of (structured and unstructured) information. Today’s portal systems allow combining access modules to different information sources side by side on a single portal webpage. However, there is no interaction between those so called portlets. When a user navigates within one portlet, the others remain unchanged, which means that each source has to be searched individually for relevant information. This paper discusses integration aspects within enterprise knowledge portals and presents an approach for communicating the user context (revealing the user’s information need) among portlets, utilizing Semantic Web technologies. For example, the query context of an OLAP portlet, which provides access to structured data stored in a data warehouse, can be used by an information retrieval portlet in order to automatically provide the user with related documents found in the organization’s document management system. The paper shortly presents a prototype that we are building to evaluate our approach, demonstrating such an OLAP and information retrieval integration. Keywords Knowledge Management, Integration, Portals, OLAP, Information Retrieval, Semantic Web. 1. INTRODUCTION A major challenge of today’s information systems is to provide the user with the right information at the right time. Using Web- based technologies, knowledge portals are an emerging approach for providing a single point of access to various types of information, making an important contribution to enabling enterprise knowledge management. This paper discusses integration aspects in the context of enterprise knowledge portals. In particular, the integration of structured information (like OLAP data stored in a data warehouse) and unstructured information (e.g. in form of documents) is a key issue of this paper. We base our approach on integrated metadata, using an ontology for concept mapping, together with an approach for context integration. Today’s portal systems allow combining different portal components side by side on a single portal webpage. However, there is no interaction between those so called portlets. When a user navigates within one portlet, the others remain unchanged, which means that each source has to be searched individually for relevant information. This paper presents an approach for global searching and for communicating the user context among portlets. This approach is, to our knowledge, unique. In the concrete case of integrating structured data warehouse data and unstructured documents, the query context of an OLAP portlet (i.e. the information shown within a certain OLAP report) can be used by an information retrieval portlet to automatically provide the user with related documents found in the organization’s document management system. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In section 2 enterprise knowledge portals and organizational memory systems are introduced. Section 3 discusses approaches for global searching over multiple information sources. The main contribution of this paper is, however, the context integration approach presented in section 4. Section 5 shortly introduces the prototype portal system we are currently building to evaluate our ideas. Section 6 presents related work and compares our approach to others in the literature. Finally, section 7 concludes the paper and discusses remaining open issues and possible future work. 2. ENTERPRISE KNOWLEDGE PORTALS AND ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY In Latin the term “portal” means something like door or gate. Accordingly it is used for webpages which provide an entry point to the Internet or an intranet. In contrast to Web portals, community portals, etc., enterprise (also B2E, business-to- employee) portals focus on corporate information and services which should be provided to the employees of an enterprise. The terms enterprise portal and enterprise information portal are used interchangeably. The goal is to provide the user with a consolidated, personalized user interface to all information he needs for his daily tasks. 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