Patent ID: 7792836

Claim:
A method for operating a distributed network system of internet client-server devices for resource metadata management, comprising: providing a metadata representation for each of a plurality of resources, wherein said each of the resources is an entity including an item comprising a unique uniform resource identifier (URI), a person, an organization, a publication, a product, an event, or an activity; registering said each of the resource entities at one of a plurality of registries, wherein said each of the registered resource entities is identified by a globally unique URI; publishing said each of the resource entities at one of a plurality of directories, wherein said each of the registered and identified resource entities is specified with a location and description; receiving two or more queries by a query parser, determining, by the query parser, at least one of the two or more queries is a non-semantic query and at least one of the remaining of queries is a semantic query; forwarding, by the query parser, the at least one non-semantic query to the registries, wherein the registries are configured to manage and publish non-semantic metadata; forwarding, by the query parser, the at least one remaining semantic query only to the directories, wherein the directories are configured to manage and publish semantic metadata, wherein the semantic metadata is in resource description framework (RDF) or web ontology language (OWL) format; identifying a metadata record within the metadata of the one of the registries for a selected resource entity of the resource entities in response to the at least non-semantic query; identifying a metadata record within the metadata of the one of the directories for the selected resource entity of the resource entities in response to the remaining semantic query; performing searching for the at least one non-semantic query for one or more of the resource entities across at least one of the registries to at least one of the directories; performing searching for the at least one remaining semantic query for one or more of the resource entities across at least one of the directories to at least one of the registries.