Swoogle.umbc.edu - Search Engine for The Semantic Web

Swoogle is a search engine for semantic web information. Anything you want to know about the semantic web, you can search for on Swoogle-- which incidentally, should you be wondering, stands for Semantic Web Ontology, and the rest, well that’s up to you for now. Swoogle makes use of a system of crawlers to root out RDF and Html documents with RDF content concerning all things having to do with this new vogue the semantic web. Swoogle figures out what’s meaningful about these docs and indexes all this data in its database. Furthermore, it extracts relational data between and amongst documents, for easier search and organization. From there, users can find out relevant information. The project, put together by the engineering department at the University of Maryland, is written primarily in Java and PHP. It’s capable of searching over 10,000 ontologies and indexes more than a million web documents.

“Swoogle is a search engine for the Semantic Web on the Web. Swoogle crawl the World Wide Web for a special class of web documents called Semantic Web documents, which are written in RDF. Currently, it provides the following services to the following services:
• Search Semantic Web ontologies
• search Semantic Web instance data
• search Semantic Web terms, i.e., URIs that have been defined as classes and properties
• provide metadata of Semantic Web documents and support browsing the Semantic Web. (Please refer to Li Ding et. al., Finding and Ranking Knowledge on the Semantic Web, ISWC'04 for details)
• archive different versions of Semantic Web documents”

As this is a research project first and foremost, there isn’t a whole lot of hype surrounding it. However, its approach and facility to indexing semantic web documents is ahead of the times. As this is a very specific search engine it bodes well for an increasingly complex web which demands pinpoint specificity.

How well funded is this project? Will it evolve into something inherently practical and sought after, or will it remain merely an item of research?