On2broker: Semantic-Based Access to Information Sources at the WWW.

On2broker provides brokering services to improve access to heterogeneous, distributed, and semistructured information sources as they are presented in the World Wide Web. It relies on the use of ontologies to make explicit the semantics of Web pages. This paper discusses the general architecture and main components (i.e., query engine, information agent, inference engine, and database manager) of On2broker and provides some application scenarios. The paper shows how semantic based access is provided to Web sources described with HTML (HyperText Markup Language), XML (eXtensible Markup Language), or RDF (Resource Description Framework). (Contains 15 references.) (Author/MES)