Eileen Brown recently reported that SWiPE hopes to make querying search engines a less frustrating experience. Brown writes, “If you struggle with RDF triples (Resource Description Framework) and SPARQL (Query language and protocol for RDF) do not despair. SWiPE (Searching WIkiPedia by Example) allows semantic and well-structured knowledge bases to be easily queried from within the pages of Wikipedia. If you want to know which cities in Florida, founded in last century have more than 50 thousand people you will be able to enter the query conditions directly into the Infobox of a Wikipedia page. Swipe activates certain fields of Wikipedia that generate equivalent SPARQL queries executed on DBpedia.”

She continues, “Swipe is a middleware system that intercepts user’s browser requests for Wikipedia pages to introduce an in-page SBE (Search By Example) user interface.  Swipe answers structured queries posed by the user through the SBE interface. It uses familiar Wikipedia pages to help you construct queries, returning the results to the familiar Wikipedia interface or a standalone web page.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy SWiPE