SemSearch: A Search Engine for the Semantic Web
Proc. 5th Intern. Conf. on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management Managing Knowledge in a World of Networks, Lect. Notes in Comp. Sci., Springer, Podebrady, Czech Republic (Oct 2006), (2006)Abstract
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 tech-
nologies but with little support for naive users, i.e., ordinary end users
who are not necessarily familiar with domain specific semantic data, on-
tologies, 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 comprehen-
sive means to produce precise answers that on the one hand satisfy user
queries and on the other hand are self-explanatory and understandable
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.
