An integration site for Semantic Web metadata

The Semantic Web has motivated many communities to provide data in a machine-readable format. However, the available data has not been utilized to far to the extent possible. The data, which has been created by a large number of people, is dispersed across the Web. Creating the data without central coordination results in RDF of varying quality and makes it obligatory to cleanse the collected data before integration. The SECO system presented in this paper harvests RDF files from the Web and consolidates the different data sets into a coherent representation aligned along an internal schema. SECO provides interfaces for humans to browse and for software agents to query the data repository. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of RDF data available online, the architecture and implementation of the SECO application, and discuss some of the experienced gained while collecting and integrating RDF on the Web.