Swoogle employed a system of crawlers to discover RDF documents and HTML documents with embedded RDF content.
Swoogle reasoned about these documents and their constituent parts (e.g., terms and triples) and recorded and indexed meaningful metadata about them in its database.
Several techniques were used to rank query results inspired by the PageRank algorithm developed at Google but adapted to the semantics and use patterns found in semantic web documents.
Swoogle was developed at and was hosted by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) with funding from the US DARPA and National Science Foundation agencies.
It was PhD thesis work of Li Ding advised by Professor Tim Finin.