Towards integrative enterprise knowledge portals

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.