Book Description

The book is composed of two main parts. The first part is a general study of Semantic Web Search. The second part specifically focuses on the use of semantics throughout the search process, compiling a big picture of Process-oriented Semantic Web Search from different pieces of work that target specific aspects of the process. In particular, this book provides a rigorous account of the concepts and technologies proposed for searching resources and semantic data on the Semantic Web. To collate the various approaches and to better understand what the notion of Semantic Web Search entails, this book presents a general Semantic Web Search model. With respect to this model, the book provides a comprehensive discussion of the state-of-the-art. It elaborates on approaches for crawling, managing and searching Semantic Web resources as well as the various schemes proposed for ranking search results. Besides these specific approaches, search is also studied in a general multi-data-source scenario. This shall demonstrate how this work on search is extended and applied to the Web setting. A major feature of the book is that it considers search and the use of semantics for search also from a process point of view. Extending the general model, the book introduces the notion of Process-oriented Semantic Web Search, where semantics is exploited throughout the entire search process – from query construction to query processing up to result presentation and query refinement. Specific pieces of work targeting these individual steps of the process are combined to form a coherent and consistent picture of Process-oriented Semantic Web Search. In order to convey this general notion as well as the specific concepts and technologies developed for supporting the search process, this book presents a compilation of work called SemSearchPro and provides detailed descriptions on the underlying approaches.