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The most beneficial service we developed is a dedicated semantic search engine, which allows users to
find information by concept, from a given keyword, using all available sources of information. When a user
searches for ‘France’, the system will suggest all instances containing that word whether it is used in the
label or the tag. For example, the user will retrieve ‘Association des Maires de France’, ‘France’ and
‘Electricité de France’. This approach allows the user to define precisely what they are looking for and to
then display related information from wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds. In addition, our system can also reuse
resources labels to provide a first step of semi-automatic indexing of incoming RSS feeds. The system also
proposes to extend search regarding relationships between concepts that exist in our ontologies, for
example, suggesting ‘Solar energy’ when searching for ‘Renewable energies’.
Another interesting component we can now provide due to the technology is wiki content geolocation.
Since we primarily use the Geonames ontology to model location, we can reuse the freely-available data
from the Geonames project to build geolocation services at zero cost to the company.

Key Benefits of Using Semantic Web Technologies
unifying Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web with lightweight ontologies;
common semantics to model meta-data of existing Web 2.0 services with SIOC;
advanced and collaborative knowledge modeling using wikis;
interlinking tags, ontology instances and tagged content with MOAT;
reusing ontologies and RDF data available on the Web;
ability to merge and query data from various services using a central storage system;
ontology based querying;
suggesting related content thanks to relationships in the ontology;
evolution of query services thanks to the SPARQL language and protocol;
Finally, one of the most important points of our system is that most of the semantics are hidden from end users
who do not need to struggle with complex Semantic Web modeling principles to benefit from the services.

Source: EDF (2008)

GIF (Graphics
Interchange Format) Graphical images (GIF, JPEG and PNG files)
A graphics format and
compression algorithm Graphics produced by graphic designers or captured using digital cameras can be readily
best used for simple incorporated into web pages as images. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and JPEG
graphics.
(Joint Photographics Experts Group) refer to the two standard file formats most com-

JPEG (Joint monly used to present images on web pages. GIF files are limited to 256 colours and are best
Photographics used for small simple graphics such as banner adverts, while JPEG is best used for larger
Experts Group)
images where image quality is important, such as photographs. Both formats use image
A graphics format
and compression compression technology to minimize the size of downloaded files.
algorithm best used for The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file format is growing in popularity since it is a
photographs.
patent and licence-free standard file format approved by the World Wide Web Consortium
PNG (Portable to replace the GIF file format.
Network Graphics)
A graphics format defined Animated graphical information (GIFs and plug-ins)
to supersede the GIF
format. Its features GIF files can also be used for interactive banner adverts. Plug-ins are additional programs,
include compression, sometimes referred to as ‘helper applications’, that work in association with the web browser
transparency and to provide features not present in the basic web browser. The best-known plug-ins are prob-
progressive loading.
ably the one for Adobe Acrobat that is used to display documents in .pdf format
Plug-in (www.adobe.com) and the Macromedia Flash and Shockwave products for producing inter-
A program that must be active graphics (www.macromedia.com). Silverlight (www.silverlight.net) is a similar service
downloaded to view
particular content such as introduced by Microsoft in 2007 for delivery of applications and streamed media.
an animation.