Stephen Downes

In their own words: "Ontobroker [has] three core elements: a query interface for formulating queries, an inference engine used to derive answers, and a webcrawler used to collect the required knowledge from the web. We provide a representation language for formulating ontologies. A subset of it is used to formulate queries, i.e. to define the query language. A formal semantics is defined to enable automatic reasoning by the inference engine. An annotation language is offered to enable knowledge providers to enrich web documents with ontological information. The strength of our approach is the tight coupling of informal, semiformal and formal information and knowledge. This supports their maintenance and provides a service that can be used more generally for the purpose of knowledge management and for integrating knowledge-based reasoning and semiformal representation of documents."