Users find it easier to navigate and find information when the concepts used to organize the information are exposed as web pages. These "concept pages” can act as starting points or hubs for navigation paths and can be indexed by web crawlers and site search engines.
Most web content management systems provide limited functionality for managing concepts. Often the support is strictly limited to simple text tags and in the best case a hierarchy of concepts. People do not think in terms of these hierarchies or tags but in terms of semantic relationships between concepts.
The Web3 Platform provides a toolset to create and manage concepts and their relationships. It also provides services for publishing this information and integrating into an existing web CMS. The Concepts for SharePoint product implements this for Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
In the case of sites that are only presenting concepts and concept relationships there is no need for an additional external CMS as the Web3 Platform can be used to publish HTML pages directly.
In addition to providing human-readable access to data, many data owners now also want to make data available to other applications. The Web3 Platform supports Linked Data standards for exposing structured and semantically linked data sets.
Examples
A healthcare provider publishes information for patients with concepts for diagnoses, treatments, locations where treatments are available.
An academic institution publishes information about papers produced with concepts for academics, publications, faculties, research areas.
A company provides an online catalogue of product offerings with concepts for products and product groups, resellers and locations to enable customers to find where products can be purchased.