Title: Welcome to Apache Stanbol!

<em>Apache Stanbol provides a set of reusable components for semantic content
management.</em><br />

Apache Stanbol's intended use is to extend traditional content management
systems with semantic services. Other feasible use cases include: direct usage
from web applications (e.g. for tag extraction/suggestion; or text completion
in search fields), 'smart' content workflows or email routing based on
extracted entities, topics, etc.
<div style="text-align: center">
![Apache Stanbol - the Semantic Engine](images/stanbol-semanticengine.png
"Apache Stanbol is aimed at bringing semantic technologies to content management systems.")
</div>

In order to be used as a semantic engine via its services, all
[components](docs/trunk/components/) offer their functionalities in terms of a
RESTful web service API.

Apache Stanbol's main features are:

- **[Content Enhancement](docs/trunk/components/enhancer)**<br>
  Services that add semantic information to “non-semantic” pieces of content.
- **[Reasoning](docs/trunk/components/reasoner/)**<br>
  Services that are able to retrieve additional semantic information about the
  content based on the semantic information retrieved via content enhancement.
- **[Knowledge Models](docs/trunk/components/ontologymanager/)**<br>
  Services that are used to define and manipulate the data models (e.g.
  ontologies) that are used to store the semantic information.
- **[Persistence](docs/trunk/components/contenthub/)**<br>
  Services that store (or cache) semantic information, i.e. enhanced content,
  entities, facts, and make it searchable.

See the [overview page](overview.html) for a more comprehensive list of
features provided by Apache Stanbol. If you are a developer, you might also
want to look at the [components page](docs/trunk/components/) for digging into
the technical details.

Here is a short list of technologies and frameworks used by Apache Stanbol:

- Functionalities are provided as **RESTful services** returning results as
  [RDF](http://www.w3.org/RDF/) (Resource Description Language) and
  [JSON](http://www.json.org/). Apache Stanbol also supports the use of
  [JSON-LD](http://json-ld.org/).
- Apache Stanbol can be run as a **standalone application** (packaged as a
  runable JAR) or as an **web application** (packaged as a WAR file) deployable
  in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat.
- Written in Java based on the [OSGi](http://www2.osgi.org/Specifications/HomePage)
  as component framework.
- Implemented using frameworks such as [Apache
  Solr](http://lucene.apache.org/solr/) - for semantic search; [Apache
  Tika](http://tika.apache.org/) - for plain text and metadata extraction;
  [Apache OpenNLP](http://opennlp.apache.org/) - for natural language
  processing; [Apache Clerezza](http://incubator.apache.org/clerezza/) and
  [Apache Jena](http://jena.apache.org/) - as RDF and storage frameworks;
  [Apache Felix](http://felix.apache.org) as OSGi framework and
  [Apache Sling](http://sling.apache.org) for deployment.

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The Apache Stanbol project was initiated by the European R&D project
[IKS](http://www.iks-project.eu) - Interactive Knowledge Stack for small to
medium CMS providers. Some people who are working on the project are part-
funded by the IKS project, as well as by several European SME CMS providers,
who are [adopting Apache Stanbol](http://wiki.iks-
project.eu/index.php/Participants).