agrohnaut

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.