From Web Search to Semantic Web Search

Many experts predict that the next huge step forward in Web information technology will be achieved by adding semantics to Web data, and will possibly consist of (some form of) the Semantic Web. In this paper, we present an approach to Semantic Web search, which combines standard Web search with ontological background knowledge. In fact, we show how standard Web search engines can be used as the main inference motor for ontology-based search. To make this possible, lightweight software clients are used for annotation and query decomposition. We develop the formal model behind this approach and also provide an implementation in desktop search. Experiments show that the implementation scales quite well to very large amounts of data. 1Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, Università della Calabria, Via P. Bucci, cubo 42 c, 87036 Rende, Italy; e-mail: [email protected]. 2Dipartimento di Informatica e Automazione, Università Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale 79, 00146 Roma, Italy; e-mail: [email protected]. 3Computing Laboratory and Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, University of Oxford, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK; e-mail: [email protected]. 4Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK; e-mail: [email protected]. Institut für Informationssysteme, Technische Universität Wien, Favoritenstraße 9-11, 1040 Wien, Austria; e-mail: [email protected]. Acknowledgements: Georg Gottlob’s work was supported by the EPSRC grant Number EP/E010865/1 “Schema Mappings and Automated Services for Data Integration.” Georg Gottlob, whose work was partially carried out at the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, gratefully acknowledges support from the Royal Society as the holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award. Thomas Lukasiewicz’s work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under the Heisenberg Programme. Copyright c © 2008 by the authors INFSYS RR 1843-08-11 1