Semantic Web Search Engine: the SWSE Mission Statement

Posted on October 5, 2009
Filed Under data portability, linked data, online tools, search engine, semantic web, web evolution | View Comments

I’d like to quote the mission statement from the SWSE homepage, a “Semantic Web Search Engine” project attempting to crawl the web of data – including RSS, FOAF, RDF vocabularies…

Although the Semantic Web (SW) is still very much in its infancy, there is already a lot of data out there which conforms to the proposed SW standards (e.g. RDF and OWL). Small vertical vocabularies and ontologies have emerged, and the community of people using these is growing daily. People publish descriptions about themselves using FOAF (Friend of a Friend), news providers publish newsfeeds in RSS (RDF Site Summary), and pictures are being annotated using various RDF vocabularies. The amount of available formal data is growing steadily, but a means to find and thus utilize this data is still missing. What is needed is the equivalent of the services a search engine currently provides for the HTML-web: a service which continuously explores and indexes the Semantic Web and provides an easy-to-use interface through which users can find the data they are looking for. We are therefore developing a Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE, pronounced “swizzy”).

You can also try out the prototype yourself at this address.

Source: SWSE Official Page