Semantic Web Portal: A Platform for Better Browsing and Visualizing Semantic Data

One of the major complaints about Semantic Web technologies is that there are few user-friendly ways for displaying, browsing and querying semantic data. Lacking of effective interfaces for end users can significantly hinder further deployment of the Semantic Web. This paper proposes the Semantic Web Portal (SWP) as a light-weight platform, unifying off-the-shelf Semantic Web tools to help domain users organize, browse and visualize relevant semantic data in a meaningful manner. The proposed SWP has been demonstrated, tested and evaluated in several different domains, such as a middle-sized research group portal, a government dataset catalog portal, a health center portal for patient data and a Linked Open Data portal for bio-chemical data.