Consensus ontologies. Reconciling the semantics of Web pages and agents

As you build a Web site, it is worthwhile asking, "Should I put my information where it belongs or where people are most likely to look for it?" Our recent research into improving searching through ontologies is providing some interesting results to answer this question. The techniques developed by our research bring organization to the information received and reconcile the semantics of each document. Our goal is to help users retrieve dynamically generated information that is tailored to their individual needs and preferences. We believe that it is easier for individuals or small groups to develop their own ontologies, regardless of whether global ones are available, and that these can be automatically and ex-post-facto related. We are working to determine the efficacy of local annotation for Web sources, as well as performing reconciliation that is qualified by measures of semantic distance. If successful, this research will enable software agents to resolve the semantic misconceptions that inhibit successful interoperation with other agents and that limit the effectiveness of searching distributed information sources.