Pushing knowledge management in Web information systems engineering

Knowledge management-based Web information systems (k-WIS) are a novel class of Web information systems whose main goal is to adapt content and presentation with respect to user needs and backgrounds through the execution of knowledge management processes. K-WIS involve complex issues such as knowledge representation, classification and clustering, reasoning, and, more recently, ontologies and semantic Web. In This work we present a methodology for the designing and developing of k-WIS, starting from the application domain analysis. We also provide a reference multilayer architecture for k-WIS and a pruning algorithm, called KM search, that allows to improve Web resources searching and classification. In our opinion, a k-WIS 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 k-WIS authoring tool able to support our methodology.