FAQ
Falcons is a keyword-based search engine for the Semantic Web, equipped with browsing capability. Falcons provides keyword-based search for URIs identifying objects and concepts (classes and properties) on the Semantic Web. Falcons also provides a summarization for each entity (object, class, property) for rapid understanding.
In Falcons Object Search, you can enter several keywords about the object you want to find, and click on "Search Objects" button. You can use Boolean operators to narrow or broaden your searches, use quotes for exact phrases, and use wildcard characters (* and ?) in phrases. Actually, you can construct any queries subject to the Query Parser syntax in Lucene.
In the results page, for each object, we provide its URI, types, labels, and a hyperlink directed to the page providing its provenance and usage. For each object, you can also click on the reading glass right after its title to view its summarization for rapid understanding.
You can use the navigation hierarchy of types at the top of the results page to refine your search.
In Falcons Concept Search, you can enter several keywords about the class or property you want to find, and click on "Search Concepts" button. You can use Boolean operators to narrow or broaden your searches, use quotes for exact phrases, and use wildcard characters (* and ?) in phrases. Actually, you can construct any queries subject to the Query Parser syntax in Lucene.
In the results page, for each class (
) and property (
), we provide its URI, types, labels, and a hyperlink directed to the page providing its provenance and usage. For each class and property, you can also click on the reading glass right after its title to view its summarization for rapid understanding.
You can use the recommended vocabularies at the top of the results page to refine your search.
In the results page, several salient RDF sentences (triples) about the entity are selected and organized according to the vocabularies that the predicates of these sentences (triples) come from. Each sentence (triple) is associated with its provenance (an RDF/XML document), which is listed at the right side of the page. You can proceed to browse related entities by clicking on the reading glasses.
You can submit a URL of a Semantic Web document here. Currently, we can only process documents in the RDF/XML format. The URL will eventually be checked by our crawler. However, we cannot make any predictions about when it will be indexed.
Because anyone can publish anything on the Semantic Web, it is possible that a URI, which maybe has not been "declared" by its potential owner, is used in some other documents. In this case, we warn users against using such URIs.
Falcons parses RDF/XML documents using Jena, stores data in MySQL, and indexes data using Lucene.
Let's start with Falcon. Falcon means Finding, Aligning and Learning ontologies, ultimately for Capturing knowledge via ONtology-driven approaches. Falcon is a series of tools and services developed for the Semantic Web by Institute of Web Science (IWS), Southeast University, China. Representative tools and services in Falcon series include Falcon-AO, an automatic ontology matching tool, and Falcon-S, a semantic image search engine in the soccer domain. And Falcons, as the name indicates, is an ultimate application that integrates all the methods in these tools and services to serve as a fundamental service on the Semantic Web.
Gong Cheng, Weiyi Ge, Yuzhong Qu
Falcons: Searching and Browsing Entities on the Semantic Web
In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web, pages 1101--1102, 2008
Gong Cheng, Weiyi Ge, Honghan Wu, Yuzhong Qu
Searching Semantic Web Objects Based on Class Hierarchies
In WWW 2008 Workshop on Linked Data on the Web, 2008