Search

Significant efforts have focused in the past years on bringing large amounts of metadata online and the success of these efforts can be seen by the impressive number of web sites exposing data in RDFa or RDF/XML. However, little is known about the extent to which this data fits the needs of ordinary web users with everyday information needs. In this paper we study what we perceive as the semantic gap between the supply of data on the Semantic Web and the needs of web users as expressed in the queries submitted to a major Web search engine. We perform our analysis on both the level of instances and ontologies. First, we first look at how much data is actually relevant to Web queries and what kind of data is it. Second, we provide a generic method to extract the attributes that Web users are searching for regarding particular classes of entities. This method allows to contrast class definitions found in Semantic Web vocabularies with the attributes of objects that users are interested in. Our findings are crucial to measuring the potential of semantic search, but also speak to the state of the Semantic Web in general.

Finding mappings between compatible ontologies is an important but difficult open problem. Instance-based methods for solving this problem have the advantage of focusing on the most active parts of the ontologies and reflect concept semantics as they are actually being used. However such methods have not at present been widely investigated in ontology mapping, compared to linguistic and structural techniques. Furthermore, previous instance-based mapping techniques were only applicable to cases where a substantial set of instances was available that was doubly annotated with both vocabularies. In this paper we approach the mapping problem as a classification problem based on the similarity between instances of concepts. This has the advantage that no doubly annotated instances are required, so that the method can be applied to any two corpora annotated with their own vocabularies. We evaluate the resulting classifiers on two real-world use cases, one with homogeneous and one with heterogeneous instances. The results illustrate the efficiency and generality of this method.

The amount of scholarly data available on the web is steadily increasing, enabling different types of analytics which can provide important insights into the research activity. In order to make sense of and explore this large-scale body of knowledge we need an accurate, comprehensive and up-to-date ontology of research topics. Unfortunately, human crafted classifications do not satisfy these criteria, as they evolve too slowly and tend to be too coarse-grained. Current automated methods for generating ontologies of research areas also present a number of limitations, such as: i) they do not consider the rich amount of indirect statistical and semantic relationships, which can help to understand the relation between two topics – e.g., the fact that two research areas are associated with a similar set of venues or technologies; ii) they do not distinguish between different kinds of hierarchical relationships; and iii) they are not able to handle effectively ambiguous topics characterized by a noisy set of relationships. In this paper we present Klink-2, a novel approach which improves on our earlier work on automatic generation of semantic topic networks and addresses the aforementioned limitations by taking advantage of a variety of knowledge sources available on the web. In particular, Klink-2 analyses networks of research entities (including papers, authors, venues, and technologies) to infer three kinds of semantic relationships between topics. It also identifies ambiguous keywords (e.g., “ontology”) and separates them into the appropriate distinct topics – e.g., “ontology/philosophy” vs. “ontology/semantic web”. Our experimental evaluation shows that the ability of Klink-2 to integrate a high number of data sources and to generate topics with accurate contextual meaning yields significant improvements over other algorithms in terms of both precision and recall.

The QL profile of OWL 2 has been designed so that it is possible to use database technology for query answering via query rewriting. We present a comparison of our resolution based rewriting algorithm with the standard algorithm proposed by Calvanese et al., implementing both and conducting an empirical evaluation using ontologies and queries derived from realistic applications. The results indicate that our algorithm produces significantly smaller rewritings in most cases, which could be important for practicality in realistic applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.