Ann: Falcons -- a new search engine for the Semantic Web

Hi all,

We're pleased to announce that a newly developed search engine for the Semantic Web, called Falcons, becomes online now [1]. It's a keyword-based search engine, equipped with browsing capability. For each entity being returned, Falcons provides its labels, types, provenance and usage information. In addition to an entry (the "reading glass" icon) for browsing the returned entity, Falcons also provides an "Entity Browse" interface for users to directly browse an entity with a known URIref. 

The functional features of the Falcons system include:
1. Searching concepts guided by recommended vocabularies, to learn more about mapped concepts and recommended vocabularies;
2. Searching objects guided by recommended concepts, to enable refining search results by selecting object type;
3. Browsing entity summarization via concept spaces, to enable better understanding of the concerned entity as well as linked entities being captured.

The technical features of the Falcons system include:
1. Capturing concept spaces on the Semantic Web, e.g. recognising types of entities, grasping the intension and extension for each concept space;
2. A comprehensive indexing method to enable finding related entities as well as locating possible vocabularies; 
3. A summarization method to enable browsing entities via concept spaces.

Falcons is just developed and depolyed at Institute of Web Science [2], Southeast University, P.R.China. This work is our first step towards searching and browsing the Semantic Web with concept spaces. Any comments are welcome.

Regards,


Yuzhong Qu

[1] http://iws.seu.edu.cn/services/falcons/


[2] http://iws.seu.edu.cn/

Received on Friday, 9 November 2007 06:21:09 UTC