Abstract
Faceted search and querying are two well-known paradigms to search the Semantic Web. Querying languages, such as SPARQL, offer expressive means for searching RDF datasets, but they are difficult to use. Query assistants help users to write well-formed queries, but they do not prevent empty results. Faceted search supports exploratory search, i.e., guided navigation that returns rich feedbacks to users, and prevents them to fall in dead-ends (empty results). However, faceted search systems do not offer the same expressiveness as query languages. We introduce Query-based Faceted Search (QFS), the combination of an expressive query language and faceted search, to reconcile the two paradigms. In this paper, the LISQL query language generalizes existing semantic faceted search systems, and covers most features of SPARQL. A prototype, Sewelis (aka. Camelis 2), has been implemented, and a usability evaluation demonstrated that QFS retains the ease-of-use of faceted search, and enables users to build complex queries with little training.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Brooke, J.: SUS: A quick and dirty usability scale. In: Jordan, P., Thomas, B., Weerdmeester, B., McClelland, A. (eds.) Usability Evaluation in Industry, pp. 189–194. Taylor and Francis, London (1996)
Ferré, S.: Camelis: a logical information system to organize and browse a collection of documents. Int. J. General Systems 38(4) (2009)
Ferré, S., Hermann, A., Ducassé, M.: Semantic faceted search: Safe and expressive navigation in RDF graphs. Research report, IRISA (2011), http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00410959/PDF/PI-1964.pdf
Ferré, S., Ridoux, O.: A File System Based on Concept Analysis. In: Palamidessi, C., Moniz Pereira, L., Lloyd, J.W., Dahl, V., Furbach, U., Kerber, M., Lau, K.-K., Sagiv, Y., Stuckey, P.J. (eds.) CL 2000. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1861, pp. 1033–1047. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Hearst, M., Elliott, A., English, J., Sinha, R., Swearingen, K., Yee, K.P.: Finding the flow in web site search. Communications of the ACM 45(9), 42–49 (2002)
Heim, P., Ertl, T., Ziegler, J.: Facet Graphs: Complex Semantic Querying Made Easy. In: Aroyo, L., Antoniou, G., Hyvönen, E., ten Teije, A., Stuckenschmidt, H., Cabral, L., Tudorache, T. (eds.) ESWC 2010. LNCS, vol. 6088, pp. 288–302. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Hildebrand, M., van Ossenbruggen, J., Hardman, L.: /facet: A Browser for Heterogeneous Semantic Web Repositories. In: Cruz, I., Decker, S., Allemang, D., Preist, C., Schwabe, D., Mika, P., Uschold, M., Aroyo, L.M. (eds.) ISWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4273, pp. 272–285. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Kaufmann, E., Bernstein, A.: Evaluating the usability of natural language query languages and interfaces to semantic web knowledge bases. J. Web Semantics 8(4), 377–393 (2010)
Lu, J., Ma, L., Zhang, L., Brunner, J., Wang, C., Pan, Y., Yu, Y.: SOR: A practical system for ontology storage, reasoning and search (demo). In: Int. Conf. Very Large Databases (VLDB), pp. 1402–1405. VLDB Endowment, ACM (2007)
Marchionini, G.: Exploratory search: from finding to understanding. Communications of the ACM 49(4), 41–46 (2006)
Oren, E., Delbru, R., Decker, S.: Extending Faceted Navigation for RDF Data. In: Cruz, I., Decker, S., Allemang, D., Preist, C., Schwabe, D., Mika, P., Uschold, M., Aroyo, L.M. (eds.) ISWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4273, pp. 559–572. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Sacco, G.M.: Dynamic taxonomies: A model for large information bases. IEEE Transactions Knowledge and Data Engineering 12(3), 468–479 (2000)
Sacco, G.M., Tzitzikas, Y. (eds.): Dynamic taxonomies and faceted search. The information retrieval series. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Tran, T., Wang, H., Haase, P.: Hermes: Data web search on a pay-as-you-go integration infrastructure. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 7, 189–203 (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ferré, S., Hermann, A. (2011). Semantic Search: Reconciling Expressive Querying and Exploratory Search. In: Aroyo, L., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2011. ISWC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7031. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25073-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25073-6_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25072-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25073-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)