Adopting semantic annotation systems for corporate portal management: a Telefonica case study

Corporate portals, such as the one used by the Telefónica group, make an important integral part of the enterprise infrastructure, facilitating the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of enterprise assets through blogs, news, forums, documents and information in general. However, as the amount of data grows, it becomes much more difficult to access the right asset in the precise moment when it is needed. Annotation systems try to address this problem to a certain extent by allowing the users to collaboratively annotate assets using tags so they can be found more easily by reusing these tags in queries. However, this model often falls short due to mismatches in the vocabularies of different users who use synonymous, polysemous, or more specific (or general) terms in tagging and searching. In this paper we: (a) provide a description of the corporate portal of the Telefónica group; (b) define a semantic annotation model that was developed to address the above-mentioned problems; (c) provide details of the implementation of the annotation model for the Telefónica portal; and (d) report the results of an initial evaluation of a concept-based search enabled by the model.