Querying the Web today can be a frustrating activity because the results delivered by syntactically oriented search engines often do not match the intentions of the user. The DARPA DAML project aims at overcoming this problem by allowing webpages to be marked up in a way that indicates the meaning of the content. In this paper we present our vision of a DAML-enabled search architecture. We present a set of queries of increasing complexity that should be answered efficiently in a Semantic Web. We describe several scenarios illustrating how queries are processed, identifying the main software components necessary to facilitate the search. We examine the issue of inference in search, and we address how to characterize procedures and services in DAML, enabling a DAML query language to find websites with specified capabilities. Key Words: semantic web, DAML, inference, services. Word Count: 7800 words.
Grit Denker, Jerry R. Hobbs, David L. Martin, Srin