A reference architecture for knowledge management-based Web systems

Knowledge management-based Web systems (KMbWS) are a novel class of Web information systems whose main goal is to adapt contents and presentations with respect to user needs and backgrounds through the execution of knowledge management processes. KMbWS involve complex issues such as knowledge representation, classification and clustering, reasoning, and, more recently, ontologies and semantic Web. In this paper we present a methodology for the designing and developing of KM-bWS, starting from the application domain analysis. We also provide a reference multi-layer architecture for KM-bWS. In our opinion, a KM-bWS can be considered as an "intelligent knowledge hub" because it makes distributed Web resources available by means of knowledge management techniques such as classification and clustering. Finally, we present a reference model for developing a KM-bMS authoring tool able to support our methodology.