Business case study: Semantic Portal ofInternational Affairs The Royal Institute Elcano (Real Instituto Elcano: www.realinstitutoelcano.org in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. The online content can be accessed by navigating through categories or by a keyword-based, full text search engine. We have used the Knowledge Parser software for feeding a semantic portal, where access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. In addition to an automatic ontology-based annotator, the portal includes a semantic search engine with a natural language interface, a web publication tool allowing semantic navigation, and a 3D visualization component. The semantic portal i currently being tested by the Institute. Based on interviews with experts of the Elcano Institute, and using the CIA word factbook (www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook) as the basis for the ontology of International Affairs. The CIA fact book is a large online repository with actual information on most countries of the world, along with relevant information in the fields of geography, politics, society, economics, etc We have used the comp questions approach [Uschold, Gruniger 96] to determine the scope and granularity of the domain ontology. On an iterative process knowledge engineers expanded the basic ontology into the final product including information from other four sources. Some examples of competency questions that we considered include: What countries are participating on Iraq campaign? Who is the head of the state of France? What government type has Georgia? How big is the population of Iceland? Which are all European Union member countries? which are all agreements between Spain and Brazil subscribed during Da Silva's govern? The ontology consists of several top level classes, some of which are: Place: Concept representing geographical places such as countries, cities, buildings etc Agent: Concept taken form WordNet [WordNet 98] representing entities that can execute actions modifying the domain (e.g Persons, Organizations, etc.) Events: Time expressions and events Relations: Common class for any kind of relations between concepts. ontology has been constructed in Protégé (http://protege.stanford.edu) The