On the Semantic Mapping of Schema-agnostic Queries: A Preliminary Study

The growing size, heterogeneity and complexity of databases demand the creation of strategies to facilitate users and systems to consume data. Ideally, query mechanisms should be schema-agnostic or vocabulary-independent, i.e. they should be able to match user queries in their own vocabulary and syntax to the data, abstracting data consumers from the representation of the data. Despite being a central requirement across natural language interfaces and entity search engines, there is a lack on the conceptual analysis of schema-agnosticism and on the associated semantic differences between queries and databases. This work aims at providing an initial conceptualization for schema-agnostic queries aiming at providing a fine-grained classification which can support the scoping, evaluation and development of semantic matching approaches for schema-agnostic queries.