The invention includes methods and software tools for acquiring data from diverse sources, and structuring the data in a form that may be used to determine object equivalence. Practice of the invention includes one or more of the following tools: a data acquisition web agent creator, a web agent created by the web agent creator, an agent manager for deploying said web agent, and ontology-directed classifier, an ontology-directed extractor, and an ontology-directed matcher. The tools are example driven through a graphical user interface.