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.
