The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs PowerAqua : supporting users in querying and exploring the semantic web

With the continued growth of online semantic information, the processes of searching and managing this massive scale and heterogeneous content have become increasingly challenging. In this work, we present PowerAqua, an ontologybased Question Answering system that is able to answer queries by locating and integrating information, which can be distributed across heterogeneous semantic resources. We provide a complete overview of the system including: the research challenges that it addresses, its architecture, the evaluations that have been conducted to test it, and an in-depth discussion showing how PowerAqua effectively supports users in querying and exploring Semantic Web content.