Semantic-search

From IKS Project

Creating a prototype search engine that understands microformats and RDFa might be very useful in the context of IKS:

• As a benchmark tool, by measuring how well CMSes allow the search engine to extract meaning and semantic information from the published content.
• To support the creation and communication of best practices about microformats and RDFa.
• As a publically visible example of what IKS is doing.

I'm envisioning a search engine that:

• Is publically available (in the future) at http://search.iks-project.eu
• Crawls a list of websites that are expected to provide metadata using microformats and RDFa.
• Allows new websites to be added to that list, suject to validation by search engine administrators.
• Extracts and indexes semantic information encoded in the site's web pages.
• Provides a number of example queries that demonstrate the benefits of this embedded semantic information.
• Allows for additional experiments using the "semantic index" built by crawling the configured websites.

CMS vendors and website owners can then enhance specific websites as part of pilot projects or customer projects, and use the search engine to validate and demonstrate their use of microformats and RDFa.

Note 29/06/2009: This text has been copied from Bertrand's semantic search proposal.