Ontology-based Web agents

This paper describes SHOE, a set of Simple HTML Ontology Extensions which allow World-Wide Web authors to annotate their pages with semantic knowl- edge such as "I am a graduate student" or "This person is my graduate advisor". These annotations are ex- pressed in terms of ontological knowledge which can be generated by using or extending standard ontologies available on the Web. This makes it possible to ask Web agent queries such as "Find me all graduate stu- dents in Maryland who are working on a project funded by DoD initiative 123-4567", instead of simplistic key- word searches enabled by current search engines. We have also developed a web-crawling agent, Expos´ e, which interns SHOE knowledge from web documents, making these kinds queries a reality.