Swoogle is a search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

 for Semantic Web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

 ontologies, documents, terms and data published on the Web. Swoogle employs a system of crawlers to discover RDF

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...

 documents and HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

documents with embedded RDF content. Swoogle reasons about these documents and their constituent parts (e.g., terms and triples) and records and indexes meaningful metadata about them in its database.

Swoogle provides services to human users through a browser interface and to software agents via RESTful web services. Several techniques are used to rank query results inspired by the PageRank

PageRank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set...

 algorithm developed at Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

but adapted to the semantics and use patterns found in semantic web documents.

Swoogle was developed at and is hosted by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) with funding from the US DARPA and National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 agencies. It is PhD thesis work of Li Ding advised by Professor Tim Finin

Tim Finin

Tim Finin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County...

See also

• Ontology (computer science)
  Ontology (computer science)
  In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...
  
  
• DAML and DAML+OIL
• OWL
  Web Ontology Language
  The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...
  
  
• Semantic Web
  Semantic Web
  The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...