Self Describing Components: Searching for Digital Artifacts on the Web

The Semantic Web has opened new horizons in exploring Web functionality. One of the many challenges is to proactively support the reuse of digital artifacts stored in repositories all over the world. Our goal is to contribute towards this issue, proposing a mechanism for describing and discovering artifacts called Digital Content Components (DCCs). DCCs are self-contained stored entities that may comprise any digital content, such as pieces of software, multimedia or text. Their specification takes advantage of Semantic Web standards and ontologies, both of which are used in the discovery process. DCC construction and composition procedures naturally lend themselves to patternmatching and subsumption-based search. Thus, many existing methods for Web searching can be extended to look for reusable artifacts. We validate the proposal discussing its implementation for agro-environmental planning.