Using graphically represented ontologies for searching content on the semantic Web

The idea behind the semantic Web is to include semantic information on each Web page, so that machine processing for retrieving relevant information is made easier (Berners-Lee et al., 1997). In order to be able to retrieve relevant information, the user still needs to be able to query the Web in an efficient way to exploit the full potential of semantic Web technology. This work describes an application design for using graphically represented ontologies for searching the (semantic) Web. One of the benefits of this approach is that these queries can be translated to different query languages such as RQL(Broekstra and Kampman, 2001; Karvounarakis, et al., 2001), OWL (Heflin, 2003), XQL (Robie et al., 1998), etc.