Information retrieval on the Semantic Web: Integrating inference and retrieval

One vision of the Semantic Web is that it will be much like the Web we know today, except that documents will be enriched by annotations in machine understandable markup. These annotations will provide metadata about the documents as well as machine interpretable statements capturing some of the meaning of document content. We discuss how the information retrieval paradigm might be recast in such an environment. We suggest that retrieval can be tightly bound to inference. Doing so makes today’s Web search engines useful to Semantic Web inference engines, and causes improvements in either retrieval or inference to lead directly to improvements in the other.