The Web has become the world's largest database, with search being the
main tool that allows organizations and individuals to exploit its huge
amount of information. Search on the Web has been traditionally based on
textual and structural similarities, ignoring to a large degree the
semantic dimension, i.e., understanding the meaning of the query and of
the document content. Combining search and semantics gives birth to the
idea of semantic search. Traditional search engines have already
advertised some semantic dimensions. Some of them, for instance, can
enhance their generated result sets with documents that are semantically
related to the query terms even though they may not include these terms.
Nevertheless, the exploitation of the semantic search has not yet
reached its full potential.
In this book, Roberto De Virgilio, Francesco Guerra and Yannis
Velegrakis present an extensive overview of the work done in Semantic
Search and other related areas. They explore different technologies and
solutions in depth, making their collection a valuable and stimulating
reading for both academic and industrial researchers.
The book is divided into three parts. The first introduces the readers
to the basic notions of the Web of Data. It describes the different
kinds of data that exist, their topology, and their storing and indexing
techniques. The second part is dedicated to Web Search. It presents
different types of search, like the exploratory or the path-oriented,
alongside methods for their efficient and effective implementation.
Other related topics included in this part are the use of uncertainty in
query answering, the exploitation of ontologies, and the use of
semantics in mashup design and operation. The focus of the third part is
on linked data, and more specifically, on applying ideas originating in
recommender systems on linked data management, and on techniques for the
efficiently querying answering on linked data.
