Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-06-11 Abstract

SemSearch: A Search Engine for the Semantic Web
Techreport ID: kmi-06-11
Date: 2006
Author(s): Yuangui Lei, Victoria Uren, Enrico Motta

Semantic search promises to produce precise answers to user queries by taking advantage of the availability of explicit semantics of information in the context of the semantic web. Existing tools have been primarily designed to enhance the performance of traditional search technologies but with little support for naive users, i.e., 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 hiding the complexity of semantic search from end users and making it easy to use and effective. In contrast with existing semantic-based keyword search engines which typically compromise their capability of handling complex user queries in order to overcome the problem of knowledge overhead, SemSearch not only overcomes the problem of knowledge overhead but also supports complex queries. Further, SemSearch provides comprehensive means to produce precise answers that on the one hand satisfy user queries and on the other hand are self-explanatory and derstandable by end users. A prototype of the search engine has been implemented and applied in the semantic web portal of our lab. An initial evaluation shows promising results.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection