Taalee's Semantic Engine, Sheth pointed out, overcomes the shortcomings of both these approaches through its use of intelligent agents, thereby collecting a "breadth" of information. It then cross-references this information to a knowledge base, cataloging the information assets in categories and sub-categories. This process creates the "depth" of knowledge necessary to provide precise and fresh results. "This outcome brings cataloging and searching to entirely new levels," he said, "It's the first implementation of what Tim Berners-Lee has called the Semantic Web -- his vision for the next phase of the Web's evolution."

Semantic Web

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 meaningful relationships provide Web publishers with opportunities to monetize users' searches through context/intent relevant (i.e., meaningful) advertising/promotional content. "Thus," he said, "a Semantic Web has been created and utilized by various interested parties to exchange various forms of value."

Combining semantics and automated intelligent agents, Sheth told us, produces two key advantages: precision and richness in interacting with content and freshness of the content. These advantages enable a far greater degree of asset cataloging and management, search, and personalization. "When our automated intelligent agents visit a site," he said, "they know what to look for, and they understand what they find. 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. From this structured relational metadata, Taalee provides a much higher quality of search, and presents more interesting and informative content."

With their trademarked Semantic Search and Semantic Asset Management, Taalee brings this search technique into the real world. Taalee Semantic Search combines a digital media search engine with a service that locates fresh, up-to-the-minute audio and video content. It empowers Internet users' effortless access to rich, fresh and highly relevant Web content. Its Blended Semantic Browsing and Querying combines the best of directory-like browsing with the precision of a structured, easy-to-use query, and yields, Sheth says, precise and timely results. It employs a proprietary metabase- a database of metadata- of digital media. Semantic Search has an understanding and knowledge of various digital media assets on the Web. This metabase is a database that describes each asset that results from intelligent automated crawlers' gathering of assets and their subsequent post-processing/enhancement. The gathering process is driven by Taalee's WorldModel, which contains the rules, ontology, domain knowledge, and knowledge experts necessary to carry it out.