Abstract
The future search engines on World Wide Web, the semantic search engines, will not be based merely on a word index. They will be able to understand the meaning of the content on the Web pages and carry out logical reasoning on them to perform complex search queries and return accurate results. In this paper we propose a conceptual architecture for a semantic search engine. We have discussed the components required by the engine, the requirements of these components, and their interaction with each other. Ontology editor, ontology mapper, ontology translator, Web page annotator, ontology crawler, Web crawler, query builder, knowledge base, and inference engine are the basic components of the semantic search engine. We particularly focus on the inference engine and propose the use of relational database to store the knowledge base and the ontologies to eliminate the shortcomings of the current inference engines.