Searching the Web of Data

Gerard de Melo, Katja Hose

Abstract: Search is currently undergoing a major paradigm shift away from the traditional document-centric “10 blue links” towards more explicit and actionable information. Recent advances in this area are Google’s Knowledge Graph, Virtual Personal Assistants such as Siri and Google Now, as well as the now ubiquitous entity-oriented vertical search results for places, products, etc. Apart from novel query understanding methods, these developments are largely driven by structured data that is blended into the Web Search experience. We discuss efficient indexing and query processing techniques to work with large amounts of structured data. Finally, we present query interpretation and understanding methods to map user queries to these structured data sources.