Mangrove: An Evolutionary Approach to the Semantic Web

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General  Mangrove Home  Semantic Email  Annotation Example Services/Demos  Overview  Calendar  Who's Who  Search  PubsList  Semantic Email Semantic Tools  Graphical Tagger  Schema  "Publish" People  Oren Etzioni  Alon Halevy  Jeff Lin  Luke McDowell

These pages are no longer maintained, but are provided here for reference. Contact Luke McDowell for more information. The WWW is focused on presenting documents for humans to view, rather than providing data for software-based extraction, processing, and querying. Despite numerous proposals for creating a semantic web over the last decade, the vision of the semantic web has not yet materialized. The Mangrove project seeks to create an environment in which users are motivated to create semantic content because of the existence of useful semantic services that exploit that content and because the process of generating such content is as close as possible to existing techniques for generating HTML documents. Our goal is to facilitate the simple annotation and subsequent extraction and querying of the enormous amount of information that already exists within the WWW's billions of HTML pages, rather than requiring the creation of new content from scratch. Our approach thus seeks to faciliate the gradual transformation of the current web into the semantic web. Semantic Services We provide initial services that are useful to the community even before individual users semantically annotate their pages, including: A unified department calendar A departmental Who's Who A semantic search service A research publication database. Automating common tasks via Semantic Email Click here to find out more info about these services and how they are automatically seeded with basic information. The annotation process 1. Annotation. Users annotate their documents using either our annotation tool or through a traditional editor, while consulting the schema, a simple hierarchy of allowable tags. 2. Publication. When users have finished, they publish their document by sending its URL to the semantic server. This is accomplished either by clicking a button in the annotation tool or through the online publish form. 3. Applications. The publish operation returns a set of links to semantic services that were updated based on the published data. Users can either click on one of these links or choose from the list of semantic services. 4. Iteration. Based on the results of the semantic services, users may want to refine their document annotations and publish again. Participation How to annotate your own pages. Try this to get your own events in the calendar or to augment your information in the Who's Who. How to write your own semantic services. Write the next killer app. Want to find out more or join the Mangrove project? Send mail to etzioni@cs.washington.edu Want to create a semantic web within your own organization? Send mail to lucasm@cs.washington.edu Publications Ontology-driven, Unsupervised Instance Population . Luke K. McDowell and Michael Cafarella. To appear, Journal of Web Semantics. Ontology-driven Information Extraction with OntoSyphon . Luke K. McDowell and Michael Cafarella. Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006), November 2006. Meaning for the Masses: Theory and Applications for Semantic Web and Semantic Email Systems. Luke McDowell. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Washington, August 2004. Semantic Email: Theory and Applications Luke McDowell, Oren Etzioni, and Alon Halevy. Journal of Web Semantics. 2(2): 153-183 (2004). The Specification of Agent Behavior by Ordinary People: A Case Study. Luke McDowell, Oren Etzioni, and Alon Halevy. To appear, Third International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004), November 2004. (abstract) Semantic Email. Luke McDowell, Oren Etzioni, Alon Halevy, and Henry Levy. Thirteen International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2004), May 2004. Mangrove: Enticing Ordinary People onto the Semantic Web via Instant Gratification. Luke McDowell, Oren Etzioni, Steven Gribble, Alon Halevy, Henry Levy, William Pentney, Deepak Verma, and Stani Vlasseva. Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003), October 2003. (abstract) Semantic Email: Adding Lightweight Data Manipulation Capabilities to the Email Habitat. Oren Etzioni, Alon Halevy, Henry Levy, and Luke McDowell. Sixth International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB 2003), June 2003. Evolving the Semantic Web with Mangrove. Luke McDowell, Oren Etzioni, Steven Gribble, Alon Halevy, Hank Levy, William Pentney, Deepak Verma, Stani Vlasseva (UW Tech Report February 2003). Also appeared as a summary poster at WWW 2003. Crossing the Structure Chasm. Alon Halevy, Oren Etzioni, AnHai Doan, Zachary Ives, Jayant Madhavan, Luke McDowell, Igor Tatarinov. First Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2003), Jan 2003. An Evolutionary Approach to the Semantic Web. Oren Etzioni, Steven Gribble, Alon Halevy, Hank Levy, Luke McDowell (ISWC 2002, poster)

	Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to lucasm@cs.washington.edu]