Then the publishers revamped the whole concept by grouping the information by associated subjects (sort of a print version of hyperlinks), which took years, millions of dollars, and brought us the modern version of the reference shelf classic. It confused us totally, and we have not gone back to those bookshelves since.

Interactive Ease

Taalee has taken something of that approach to Net searching, but has eliminated the confusion by allowing interactive customization, something not possible in hard copy print. It will, depending on the choice of its clients who lease and install it on their sites, chase down your own personal preferences according to your option, making it tailored to you, the Web site it's coming from, and the broader context of the subject you're interested in.

"The simplest-sounding things are sometimes the most difficult to do," said Amit Sheth, founder and chief executive officer of Taalee Inc. "But now, providers of Web-based information can offer their users the power of Taalee's Semantic Web technology to search the Web faster and more efficiently than ever before. Taalee's services, which today include Semantic Search, Directory, Cataloging, Personalization, and Targeting, are powered by its Semantic Engine and WorldModel. We're providing a meaningful context that enables our customers- content owners, publishers, and advertisers, both enterprise and media, to provide the user with the content in which they're interested. Meanwhile the content owner, publisher, and advertiser achieve their objectives with respect to communication and monetization."

Sheth's brilliance can sometimes lose the listener, which may at times be intentional, as the Semantic Engine and WorldModel are proprietary developments. Where is he coming from?

Sheth's Credentials

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 told us, 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.

"Up to now," Sheth said, "Web assets have been found, cataloged, and searched/navigated using two popular approaches. 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. Human editors can produce high quality search results, but they can't keep up with the Web's growth of content; they have the 'depth' but not the 'breadth.' Crawlers are efficient, but lack the human understanding of what the content means. Without contextual or relationship information, crawlers have the 'breadth' but not the 'depth' ".