What is Semantic Web Search?

Semantic Web Search is a search engine for the Semantic Web. Our site can be used by both people and computers to precisely locate and gather information published on the Semantic Web.

For people our Web site provides a standard search engine interface that has been extended to allow people to precisely describe the information they are trying to find. On a traditional Web search engine you might search for information about a person by using the keywords ‘John’ and ‘Smith’. This search may produce results ranging from biblical passages to iron working techniques that you must then sift through. Our site allows you to specifically search for persons (foaf:Person) that have a first name (foaf:firstName) of ‘John’ and a last name (foaf:surname) of ‘Smith’. You could then go on to perform another search to locate news articles (rss:item) that were authored by (dc:creator) that same person. We accomplish this by allowing you to describe your search using the well-defined vocabulary terms (dc:creator, foaf:Person, ...) used on the Semantic Web. Only information that exactly matches your search is returned in our results.

For computers, our site provides a web service with similar capabilities. Intelligent software agents submit precise queries to our service describing the information they need to perform a task. Our service returns to them only the information that exactly matches their request in a form that they can understand.

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web that allows the meaning of information to be precisely described in terms of well-defined vocabularies that are understood by people and computers. On the Semantic Web information is described using a new W3C standard called the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

RDF is based on the popular Extensible Markup Language (XML). RDF provides a mechanism to precisely describe the meaning of information thereby greatly enhancing XML’s strong data typing and interchange capabilities. RDF allows people, places, and things (resources) to be described and referenced using Web addresses (URLs). Information on one Web site can then reference information on another creating a vast distributed database on the current Web. All of this RDF data that is published on the Web is collectively referred to as the Semantic Web.

How do I use this site?

Its simple, using our standard search engine interface you can just type one or more of keywords describing the information you are trying to locate. This is no more complicated than a traditional Web search engine. However like a traditional Web search engine this can lead to a large number of irrelevant results. To narrow your search you can restrict it to the specific type of resource that you are trying to locate such as a person (FOAF Person) or news article (RSS Item). If your search is still producing a large number of irrelevant results than you can refine it further by specifying one or more specific property values that the resource must have.

For example if you are trying to locate a person with a last name of ‘Smith’ and a first name of ‘John’ you would enter the search string ‘[foaf:surname]~smith [foaf:firstName]~john‘. You should refer to the Search Help page for the complete details on the search string format. Although the best place for you to start creating powerful Semantic Web searches is with our on-line Search Agent.

How do I write an intelligent software agent that uses this service?

You’ll need a framework such as RDF Gateway that understands RDF to write an intelligent software agent that uses our service. We offer several sample agents written as RDF Gateway applications. You can get details on how to access Semantic Web Search through a simple web service interface here.

For a high level overview of the role of Semantic Web Search in enabling the growth of intelligent software agents on the Semantic Web read our white paper.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 11:02 am and is filed under Semantic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.