Generating exploratory search interfaces for the semantic web

Abstract

At present, the promise of the Semantic Web has yet to be realized, partly because there are few real-world applications that allow end-users to access, view and process Semantic Web information. We aim to facilitate Semantic Web adoption by providing users with advanced exploratory search capability over Semantic Web data by providing a faceted exploratory search interface for arbitrary Semantic Web repositories. Our approach takes advantage of metadata describing the structure of the respective information spaces to construct facets that can be used to visually construct semantic queries. Subsequently, we generate result overviews to display individual search results and lastly generate an incremental graph-based view for individual resource exploration. We performed proof of concept validation of our interface generation approach and present the lessons learned by a small scale feedback gathering user study.