Methods for determining the similarity of content and structuring unstructured content from heterogeneous sources

The invention includes methods and software tools for acquiring data from diverse sources, and structuring the data in a form that may be used to determine object equivalence. Practice of the invention includes one or more of the following tools: a data acquisition web agent creator, a web agent created by the web agent creator, an agent manager for deploying said web agent, and ontology-directed classifier, an ontology-directed extractor, and an ontology-directed matcher. The tools are example driven through a graphical user interface.