An Ontology-Based Approach to Designing Information Architecture of Websites

Nowadays we observe the tremendous growth of the number of websites on the Internet and the increasing complexity of website structure and features. This affects the requirements we set for the organization and presentation of information on Web resources. Two new disciplines, Information Architecture and Semantic Web, have been recently coined to address different aspects of the resources on the Web. Information Architecture establishes the practices and guidelines for defining users and designing information structure, navigation schemes, and appearance of websites. The discipline of Semantic Web has created the instruments, ontologies, to enable Web developers providing the machine-readable semantics of website content. 

In this paper, an ontology-based approach to designing information architecture of websites has been proposed. The approach harnesses the expertise of information architects in designing high quality websites as well as the new conception of defining machine-processable semantics of information resources using ontologies, which was formulated by the Semantic Web. The approach empowers Web developers with the methodology and instruments for conceptual modeling of the user aspects, information structure, navigation, and layout of Web resources as well as the mechanisms for automatic generation of websites based on the created models.