The usability of semantic search tools : a review
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paper_title: Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing?

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Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices and evaluated against the design criteria.
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paper_title: Exploratory search: from finding to understanding

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Research tools critical for exploratory search success involve the creation of new interfaces that move the process beyond predictable fact retrieval.
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paper_title: The semantic webscape: a view of the semantic web

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It has been a few years since the semantic Web was initiated by W3C, but its status has not been quantitatively measured. It is crucial to understand the status at this early stage, for researchers, developers and administrators to gain insight into what will come in this field. The objective of our work is to quantitatively measure and present the status of the semantic Web. We conduct a longitudinal study on the semantic Web pages to track trends in the use of semantic markup languages. This paper presents early results of this study with two historical data sets from October 2003 and October 2004. Our results show that while it is very early stage of semantic Web adoption, its growth outpaces that of the entire Web for the period. Also, RDF (Resource Description Framework) has dominated among semantic markup languages, taking about 98% of all semantic pages on the Web. It has been used in a variety of metadata annotation applications. This study shows that the most popular application is RSS (RDF Site Summary) for syndicating news and blogs, which takes more than 60% of all semantic Web pages. It also shows that the use of OWL (Web Ontology Language) which was recommended by W3C in early 2004 has been increased 900% for the period.
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paper_title: Query processing in ontology-based peer-to-peer systems

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The unstructured, heterogeneous and dynamic nature of the Web poses a new challenge to query-answering over multiple data sources. The so-called Semantic Web aims at providing more and semantically richer structures in terms of ontologies and meta-data. A problem that remains is the combined use of heterogeneous sources. In a dynamic environment, it is no longer realistic to assume that the involved data sources act as if they were a single (virtual) source, modelled as a global schema, as is done in classical data integration approaches. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach where we replace the role of a single virtual data source schema with a peer-to-peer approach relying on limited shared (or: overlapping) vocabularies between peers. Since overlaps between vocabularies of peers will be limited and the dynamic nature of the system prohibits the design of accurate mappings, query processing will have to be approximate. We provide a formal model for such approximate query processing based on limited shared vocabularies between peers, and we show how the quality of the approximation can be adjusted in a gradual manner. The result is a flexible architecture for query-processing in heterogenous and dynamic environments, based on a formal foundation. We present the approach and discuss it on the basis of a case study.
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paper_title: Utilizing resource importance for ranking semantic web query results

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To realize the vision of the Semantic Web, effective techniques of Information Retrieval need to be developed. Ranking the results of a search is one of the main challenges of an Information Retrieval system. In this paper we present a technique for ranking the results of a Semantic Web query. The ranking is based on various factors including the Semantic Web resource importance. We have modified a World-wide Web link analysis technique that has been effectively used to identify important Web pages to calculate the importance of Semantic Web resources. Our ranking technique has been utilized for ranking the query results of a Biomedical Patent Semantic Web.
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paper_title: Semantic search

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Activities such as Web Services and the Semantic Web are working to create a web of distributed machine understandable data. In this paper we present an application called 'Semantic Search' which is built on these supporting technologies and is designed to improve traditional web searching. We provide an overview of TAP, the application framework upon which the Semantic Search is built. We describe two implemented Semantic Search systems which, based on the denotation of the search query, augment traditional search results with relevant data aggregated from distributed sources. We also discuss some general issues related to searching and the Semantic Web and outline how an understanding of the semantics of the search terms can be used to provide better results.
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paper_title: A WordNet-based Query Expansion Method for Geographical Information Retrieval

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This report describes a query expansion method based on the expansion of geographical terms by means of WordNet synonyms and meronyms. We used this method for our participation to the GeoCLEF 2005 English monolingual task, while using the well-known Lucene search engine for indexing and retrieval. The obtained results show that the proposed method was not suitable for the GeoCLEF track, while WordNet can be used in a more eective way during the indexing phase, by adding synonyms and holonyms to the index terms.
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paper_title: SemSearch: A Search Engine for the Semantic Web

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Existing semantic search tools have been primarily designed to enhance the performance of traditional search technologies but with little support for ordinary end users who are not necessarily familiar with domain specific semantic data, ontologies, or SQL-like query languages. This paper presents SemSearch, a search engine, which pays special attention to this issue by providing several means to hide the complexity of semantic search from end users and thus make it easy to use and effective.
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paper_title: Magnet: supporting navigation in semistructured data environments

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With the growing importance of systems containing arbitrary semi-structured relationships, the need for supporting users searching in such repositories has grown. Currently support for users' search needs either has required domain-specific user interfaces or has required users to be schema experts. We have developed a general-purpose tool that offers users helpful navigation and refinement options for seeking information in these semistructured repositories. We show how a tool can be built without requiring domain-specific assumptions about the information being explored. In addition to describing a general approach to the problem, we provide a set of natural, general-purpose refinement tactics, many generalized from past work on textual information retrieval.
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paper_title: Searching the semantic Web: approximate query processing based on ontologies

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The semantic Web aims to represent the contents of Web resources in formalisms that both programs and humans can understand. It relies on rich metadata, called semantic annotations, offering explicit semantic descriptions of Web resources. These annotations are built on ontologies, representing domains through their concepts and the semantic relations between them. Ontologies are the foundations of the semantic Web and the keystone of the Web's automated tasks - searching, merging, sharing, maintaining, customizing, and monitoring.
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paper_title: An Ontology Based Visual Tool for Query Formulation Support

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In this paper we describe the principles of the design and development of an intelligent query interface, done in the context of the SEWASIE (SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies) European IST project. The SEWASIE project aims at enabling a uniform access to heterogeneous data sources through an integrated ontology. The query interface is meant to support a user in formulating a precise query - which best captures her/his information needs - even in the case of complete ignorance of the vocabulary of the underlying information system holding the data. The intelligence of the interface is driven by an ontology describing the domain of the data in the information system. The final purpose of the tool is to generate a conjunctive query ready to be executed by some evaluation engine associated to the information system.
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paper_title: Designing the User Interface. Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction

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Ben Shneiderman again provides a complete, current, and authoritative introduction to user-interface design. Students will learn practical techniques and guidelines needed to develop good systems designs - systems with interfaces the typical user can understand, predict, and control. This third edition features new chapters on the World Wide Web, information visualization, and computer-supported cooperative work. It contains expanded and earlier coverage of development methodologies, evaluation techniques, and user-interface building tools. The author provides provocative discussion of speech input/output, natural-language interaction, anthropomorphic design, virtual environments, and intelligent (software) agents.
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paper_title: Ontogator: combining view- and ontology-based search with semantic browsing

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We show how the benefits of the view-based search method, devel- oped within the information retrieval community, can be combined and extended with the benefits of ontology-based annotations and search, developed within the Semantic Web community. As a proof of the concept, we have implemented an ontology- and view-based image retrieval and recommendation browser Ontoga- tor. Ontogator is innovative in two ways. Firstly, the RDFS-based ontologies used for annotating image metadata are used in the end user interface to facilitate view- based image retrieval. The views provide the user with a search function and means for getting useful overviews of the contents in the repository. Secondly, a semantic browsing function is provided by a recommender system. This sys- tem enriches instance level image metadata by the ontology and provides the user with links to semantically related relevant images. The notion of a "semantically relevant link" is specified in terms of logical rules. To illustrate and discuss the ideas, a practical application of Ontogator to a photo repository of the Helsinki University Museum is presented.
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paper_title: Generating on the fly queries for the semantic web: The ICS-FORTH graphical RQL interface (GRQL

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Building user-friendly GUIs for browsing and filtering RDF/S description bases while exploiting in a transparent way the expressiveness of declarative query/view languages is vital for various Semantic Web applications (e.g., e-learning, e-science). In this paper we present a novel interface, called GRQL, which relies on the full power of the RDF/S data model for constructing on the fly queries expressed in RQL. More precisely, a user can navigate graphically through the individual RDF/S class and property definitions and generate transparently the RQL path expressions required to access the resources of interest. These expressions capture accurately the meaning of its navigation steps through the class (or property) subsumption and/or associations. Additionally, users can enrich the generated queries with filtering conditions on the attributes of the currently visited class while they can easily specify the resource's class(es) appearing in the query result. To the best of our knowledge, GRQL is the first application-independent GUI able to generate a unique RQL query which captures the cumulative effect of an entire user navigation session.
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paper_title: AquaLog: An Ontology-Portable Question Answering System for the Semantic Web

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As semantic markup becomes ubiquitous, it will become important to be able to ask queries and obtain answers, using natural language (NL) expressions, rather than the keyword-based retrieval mechanisms used by the current search engines. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language and an ontology as input and returns answers drawn from the available semantic markup. We say that AquaLog is portable, because the configuration time required to customize the system for a particular ontology is negligible. AquaLog combines several powerful techniques in a novel way to make sense of NL queries and to map them to semantic markup. Moreover it also includes a learning component, which ensures that the performance of the system improves over time, in response to the particular community jargon used by the end users. In this paper we describe the current version of the system, in particular discussing its portability, its reasoning capabilities, and its learning mechanism.
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paper_title: ORAKEL: A Natural Language Interface to an F-Logic Knowledge Base

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In this paper we present ORAKEL, a natural language interface which translates wh-questions into logical queries and evaluates them with respect to a given knowledge base. For this purpose, ORAKEL makes use of a compositional approach in order to construct the semantics of a wh-question. The system is in principle able to deal with arbitrary logical languages and knowledge representation paradigms, i.e. relational models, frame-based models, etc. However, in this paper we present a concrete implementation based on F-Logic and Ontobroker as underlying inference engine.
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paper_title: Question answering on the semantic Web

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Question answering on the Web is moving beyond the stage where users simply type a query and retrieve a ranked ordering of appropriate Web pages. Users and analysts want targeted answers to their questions without extraneous information. These answers might contain information from current and authoritative sources, terms with the same meaning as those used in the query, relevant links such as justifications, follow-up questions fitting the context, and provenance information. Next-generation question-answering systems might also provide better querying support. This could include identifying whether questions are incoherent and therefore can't be answered, too general and would retrieve too many answers, or over constrained and would retrieve few if any answers. We present a spectrum of techniques for improving question answering and discuss their potential uses and impact.
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paper_title: Ranking complex relationships on the semantic Web

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Industry and academia are both focusing their attention on information retrieval over semantic metadata extracted from the Web, and it is increasingly possible to analyze such metadata to discover interesting relationships. However, just as document ranking is a critical component in today's search engines, the ranking of complex relationships would be an important component in tomorrow's semantic Web engines. This article presents a flexible ranking approach to identify interesting and relevant relationships in the semantic Web. The authors demonstrate the scheme's effectiveness through an empirical evaluation over a real-world data set.
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paper_title: PowerMap: mapping the real semantic web on the fly

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Ontology mapping plays an important role in bridging the semantic gap between distributed and heterogeneous data sources. As the Semantic Web slowly becomes real and the amount of online semantic data increases, a new generation of tools is developed that automatically find and integrate this data. Unlike in the case of earlier tools where mapping has been performed at the design time of the tool, these new tools require mapping techniques that can be performed at run time. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we investigate the general requirements for run time mapping techniques. Second, we describe our PowerMap mapping algorithm that was designed to be used at run-time by an ontology based question answering tool.
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paper_title: Implicit feedback for inferring user preference: a bibliography

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Relevance feedback has a history in information retrieval that dates back well over thirty years (c.f [SL96]). Relevance feedback is typically used for query expansion during short-term modeling of a user's immediate information need and for user profiling during long-term modeling of a user's persistent interests and preferences. Traditional relevance feedback methods require that users explicitly give feedback by, for example, specifying keywords, selecting and marking documents, or answering questions about their interests . Such relevance feedback methods force users to engage in additional activities beyond their normal searching behavior . Since the cost to the user is high and the benefits are not always apparent, it can be difficult to collect the necessary data and the effectiveness of explicit techniques can be limited.
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Title: The Usability of Semantic Search Tools: A Review

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the focus of the review on user experience with semantic search tools and outline the structure of the paper.

Section 2: Motivating Example
Description 2: Provide an example to illustrate the need for semantic search, specifically using the case study from FIAT AUTO's Competitor Analysis Department.

Section 3: Iterative and Exploratory Search
Description 3: Discuss the iterative and exploratory nature of semantic search and the requirements for supporting end-users in formulating and refining queries.

Section 4: Searching Semantically
Description 4: Explain the concept of making searches semantic, including the role of ontologies and the specific requirements for semantic metadata exploitation.

Section 5: Query Type
Description 5: Describe the different types of semantic queries: entity search, relation-based search, and parameterized search.

Section 6: Search Environment
Description 6: Explore the complexities and requirements of the semantic search environment, including portability and heterogeneity.

Section 7: Intrinsic Problems
Description 7: Address the intrinsic technical and usability problems in dealing with semantic search terms and queries, including semantic matching and ranking.

Section 8: Review of Semantic Search Systems
Description 8: Categorize and review semantic search tools based on their user interaction modes: keyword-based, form-based, view-based, and natural language-based systems.

Section 9: Keyword-based Systems
Description 9: Detail the functionality and usability of keyword-based semantic search systems.

Section 10: Form-based Systems
Description 10: Discuss the usability and application of form-based systems in semantic search environments.

Section 11: View-based Systems
Description 11: Analyze the strengths and limitations of view-based semantic search tools.

Section 12: Natural Language Systems
Description 12: Review the usability of natural language-based semantic search tools and their potential in querying semantic metadata.

Section 13: Summary
Description 13: Summarize the features of the four modes of interaction and their effectiveness in supporting different query types and search environments.

Section 14: Challenges for the Future
Description 14: Identify the future challenges and research directions for improving the usability and functionality of semantic search tools in single-domain and heterogeneous environments.