Using naming authority to rank data and ontologies for web search

Abstract

The focus of web search is moving away from returning relevant documents towards returning structured data as results to user queries. A vital part in the architecture of search engines are link-based ranking algorithms, which however are targeted towards hypertext documents. Existing ranking algorithms for structured data, on the other hand, require manual input of a domain expert and are thus not applicable in cases where data integrated from a large number of sources exhibits enormous variance in vocabularies used. In such environments, the authority of data sources is an important signal that the ranking algorithm has to take into account. This paper presents algorithms for prioritising data returned by queries over web datasets expressed in RDF. We introduce the notion of naming authority which provides a correspondence between identifiers and the sources which can speak authoritatively for these identifiers. Our algorithm uses the original PageRank method to assign authority values to data sources based on a naming authority graph, and then propagates the authority values to identifiers referenced in the sources. We conduct performance and quality evaluations of the method on a large web dataset. Our method is schema-independent, requires no manual input, and has applications in search, query processing, reasoning, and user interfaces over integrated datasets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.