Evolving the Semantic Web with Mangrove

Luke K. McDowell, Oren Etzioni, Steven D. Gribble, Alon Y. Halevy, Henry M. Levy, William Pentney, Deepak Verma, Stani Vlasseva

Abstract: Despite numerous proposals for its creation, the semantic web has yet to achieve widespread adoption. Recently, some researchers have argued that participation in the semantic web is too difficult for ``ordinary'' people, limiting its growth and popularity. In response, this paper introduces M ANGROVE , a system whose goal is to evolve a portion of the semantic web from the enormous volume of facts already available in HTML documents. M ANGROVE seeks to emulate three key conditions that contributed to the explosive growth of the web: instant gratification for authors, robustness of services to malformed and malicious information, and ease of authoring. In the HTML world, a newly authored page is immediately accessible through a browser; we mimic this feature in M ANGROVE by making semantic content instantly available to services that consume the content and yield immediate, tangible benefit to authors. We have designed and implemented a M ANGROVE prototype, built several semantic services for the system, and deployed those services in our department. This paper describes M ANGROVE 's goals, introduces the system architecture, and explains how this architecture achieves our goals. Overall, M ANGROVE demonstrates a concrete path for enabling and enticing non-technical people to enter the semantic web.