Translating Naive User Queries on the Semantic Web

Query is an important way of information retrieval. One type of queries is those to search engines, which are lists of keywords without structures. Another type of queries is those to databases or knowledge bases, which must conform to the structure and terminology of the data source (e.g., SQL query to a database). In this paper, we deal with another type of queries: naive user queries–queries in users’ own terms and structures. We envision that this type of queries would be a common phenomenon on the future Semantic Web. We propose an approach that, given a naive user query, translates it into a list of queries conforming to different data source schemas. The approach is based on partial alignment between some data sources. An early prototype showed that the result is promising.