Finding knowledge, data and answers on the Semantic Web

Web search engines like Google have made us all smarter by providing ready access to the world's knowledge whenever we need to look up a fact, learn about a topic or evaluate opinions. The W3C's Semantic Web effort aims to make such knowledge more accessible to computer programs by publishing it in machine understandable form.

As the volume of Semantic Web data grows software agents will need their own search engines to help them find the relevant and trustworthy knowledge they need to perform their tasks. We will discuss the general issues underlying the indexing and retrieval of RDF based information and describe Swoogle, a crawler based search engine whose index contains information on over a million RDF documents. We will illustrate its use in several Semantic Web related research projects at UMBC.