A default extension to description logics for use in an intelligent search engine

In companies a large amount of information is maintained that is accessible via network communication tools. This makes searching for a particular piece of information a difficult task. We identified two major difficulties that are experienced using existing search engines. These difficulties are that many of the existing search engines only take syntactic information into account and therefore do not find all relevant documents, and that many of the retrieved documents do not contain relevant information. We present a search engine that tackles both of these problems. The system, Dwebic, is based on a description logic knowledge base that deals with strict taxonomic information as well as with default information. We define this description logic and introduce a new kind of inference. Dwebic has a World Wide Web interface, but our approach does not depend on the World Wide Web.