Search Engine: Quaero is looking at various indexing techniques as social tagging and bookmarking and traditional cataloging methodology

" Wolfgang Wahlster, the director of DFKI (Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz/ The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), is quoted as saying that Quaero is not only to deliver lists of search results. The service is also to give precise answers to questions.

Furthermore, the search engine will not only include web pages and scanned books, but also multimedia content like music and video. Quaero is looking at various indexing techniques as social tagging and bookmarking, as well as the more traditional cataloging methodology used by the Semantic Web Project (the Semantic Web makes use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools for sorting web pages).

Social tagging is considered to be too chaotic by the Quaero teams, while the Semantic Web approach is found too top-down. Hence the idea is perhaps to improve and combine them both.
In one pilot study the idea is apparently to develop an automatic or semi-automatic method for adding semantic metadata to web content.

The German part of the project will, for instance, develop user interfaces capable of an intelligent dialogue between the search engine and the user. Different visualisation techniques will also be considered."

For more information see(heise online - in German):

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77774