The FLERSA tool: adding semantics to a web content management system

Abstract

Purpose

Nowadays, the use of WCMS (web content management systems) is widespread. The conversion of this infrastructure into its semantic equivalent (semantic WCMS) is a critical issue, as this enables the benefits of the semantic web to be extended. The purpose of this paper is to present a FLERSA (Flexible Range Semantic Annotation) for flexible range semantic annotation.

Design/methodology/approach

A FLERSA is presented as a user‐centred annotation tool for Web content expressed in natural language. The tool has been built in order to illustrate how a WCMS called Joomla! can be converted into its semantic equivalent.

Findings

The development of the tool shows that it is possible to build a semantic WCMS through a combination of semantic components and other resources such as ontologies and emergence technologies, including XML, RDF, RDFa and OWL.

Practical implications

The paper provides a starting‐point for further research in which the principles and techniques of the FLERSA tool can be applied to any WCMS.

Originality/value

The tool allows both manual and automatic semantic annotations, as well as providing enhanced search capabilities. For manual annotation, a new flexible range markup technique is used, based on the RDFa standard, to support the evolution of annotated Web documents more effectively than XPointer. For automatic annotation, a hybrid approach based on machine learning techniques (Vector‐Space Model + n‐grams) is used to determine the concepts that the content of a Web document deals with (from an ontology which provides a taxonomy), based on previous annotations that are used as a training corpus.

Citation

Navarro‐Galindo, J.L. and Samos, J. (2012), "The FLERSA tool: adding semantics to a web content management system", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 73-126. https://doi.org/10.1108/17440081211222609