Designing Information Architecture of Websites: an Ontology-based Approach

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. In this thesis, 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.