The purpose of the semantic web is to create an environment where information is no longer merely stored but "understood" by computers, to provide users with what they are really looking for. Until now the semantic web was lacking a uniform language for information selection. The language called SPARQL has just been published by the W3C, the consortium in charge of developing web standards. "We finally have a tool for retrieving the sought-for data on the web," exclaimed Jérôme Euzenat, INRIA Exmo Project team manager. The team developed a SPARQL extension called PSPARQL, thus broadening the queries to include data navigation.
Other INRIA teams are also involved in the semantic web boom, namely Edelweiss that is working on designing a search engine called Corese. Today, the search engine, which targets corporate memory applications, project memory or knowledge management, is now part of an industrial commercialization project through the eCORE startup, now at the incubation stage.
