The Slater Technology Fund has invested $250,000 in a new Providence start-up company that’s developing software to extract specific pieces of information from Web sites.

Public Display, which was founded last year by Jamestown resident William O’Farrell, will use the money to expand research and development of its software.

“We use a combination of artificial intelligence and natural language-processing techniques to extract meaning from the Web, rather than match keyword terms,” O’Farrell said in a phone interview yesterday.

For example, his company’s software could be used by a company doing research on pharmaceutical drugs, he said, where a researcher wanted to know every product that contains a certain active ingredient.

A traditional search engine would deliver thousands of pages that have nothing to do with the needed information, he said. But Public Display’s software would be smart enough to identify and extract the relevant information, based on its context, O’Farrell said.

The company’s technology sounds similar to that of another firm that began in Providence. Simpli.com was started in 1999 by a group of graduate students and professors at Brown University. Their technology, which used linguistics and cognitive science, was designed to improve Internet searches by sorting and displaying results according to the context in which the search terms were found. In 2000, that company was bought by NetZero, a California-based technology company, for $23.5 million in cash and stock.

O’Farrell said Public Display goes beyond just finding information on the Web. It can take the results and automatically insert them into a research report, an analytical formula or a spreadsheet for further analysis, he said.

“We would not consider it a success to limit your search to only java the coffee, for example. We expect you would want to do more with that information. You would want to pull out each one of those references, who the supplier is, the address, the contact information” in a structured way.

The company’s long-term goal is to offer products to Internet advertising networks, helping them to place ads more effectively by putting them on Web sites that match certain demographics, he said.

O’Farrell, the company founder and its chief executive officer, has a history of starting successful companies. After he graduated from Brown in 1984 (he studied the social and intellectual history of Europe) he headed a small company started by some acquaintances from Brown. The Company of Science and Art, as it was called, developed a widely used video editing tool, AfterEffects. The company was purchased in 1994 by Adobe, which still sells the software. He also cofounded SpeechWorks Inc., a speech recognition company that grew out of MIT’s computer sciences lab. The company went public in 2000 and was acquired by Naunce in 2003.

O’Farrell is also a lawyer. With a degree from Harvard Law School, he worked for a time in San Francisco for a firm that had a lot of venture-capital clients. That work got him interested in becoming an entrepreneur, he said.

O’Farrell is somewhat secretive about the financial details of his company, he said, because he doesn’t want to tip off his competitors. The $250,000 investment by the Slater Technology fund was part of a $1.2-million private stock offering. He declined to name the other investors.

The company is on Chestnut Street in Providence’s jewelry district and has nine full-time employees.

He chose to start this company in Providence, he said, partly because he lives in Rhode Island and has been a resident for 17 years.

Thanks to Providence’s revitalization over the past 5 to 10 years, he said, the city has become attractive enough to keep college graduates here.

“Young, talented folks are more inclined to stick around than to head to big cities elsewhere,” he said.

tbarmann@projo.com