Ginseng: A Guided Input Natural Language Search Engine for Querying Ontologies
2006 Jena User Conference, Bristol, UK, (May 2006)Abstract
The Semantic Web presents the vision of a distributed, dynamically growing knowledge base founded on formal logic. Common users, however, seem to have problems even with the simplest Boolean expression. So how can we help users to query a web of logic that they do not seem to understand? We address this issue by presenting Ginseng, a guided input natural language search engine for the Semantic Web. Ginseng provides a quasi natural language querying access to any OWL knowledge base. The main difference between Ginseng and full natural language interfaces is that Ginseng does not use any predefined vocabulary and does not try to interpret the queries (logically or syntactically). Instead, Ginseng only knows the vocabulary defined by the currently considered ontologies.