Dr. Sheth combines experience at Honeywell, Unisys, and Bellcore with that gained as Founder and Director of the University of Georgia's Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab. Taalee's Semantic Infrastructure, he said, has been developed through extensive academic and applied research over the last five years. It combines traditional and multimedia databases, metadata management, context and domain modeling, encyclopedia data, distributed intelligent agents and XML to provide an unprecedented degree of Web searching power. The first is manual editor-based directories, where pages are manually put into categories, similar to a book's table of contents. The second is crawler-based analysis and keyword indexing, which is similar to the index at the end of a book.
Crawlers are efficient, but lack the human understanding of what the content means.
The Semantic Web, Dr. Sheth noted, is a contextual network built of meaning-related content from many sites. This content is made up of domain-specific data. Individual user desires and relevant content are mapped to each other in meaningful contexts. These advantages enable a far greater degree of asset cataloging and management, search, and personalization. Taalee agents acquire much more meaningful information, in the form of structured relational metadata, than do mere 'page scrapers,' which take all of a page's words indiscriminately and index them as keywords.