Automatic Creation and Simplified Querying of Semantic Web Content

The semantic web represents a major advance in web utility, but it is difficult to create semantic-web content because pages must be semantically annotated through processes that are mostly manual and require a high degree of engineering skill. Furthermore, users need an effective way to query the semantic web, but any burden we place on users to learn a query language is unlikely to garner sufficient user support and interest. If we want users to take advantage of the semantic web, we must devise a means for transforming existing (non-semantic) web pages into semantic web pages, and we must provide a simple and unrestricted interface for processing user queries. We propose using information extraction ontologies to handle both of these challenges. We show how a successful ontology-based data-extraction technique can (1) automatically generate semantic annotations for ordinary web pages, and (2) support free-form, textual queries. Our approach demonstrates how the semantic web can be created for and used by ordinary people. We have created an initial prototype to demonstrate that our proposal works.