Interrogation Based on Semantic Annotations: Context-Based Construction of Formal Queries from Keywords

Traditional information search approaches do not explicitly capture the meaning of a keyword query, but provide a good way for the user to express his or her information needs based on the keywords. In principle, semantic search aims to produce better results than traditional keyword search, but its progression has retarded because of to the complexity of the query languages. In this article, the authors present an approach to adapt keyword queries to querying the semantic web based on semantic annotations: the approach automatically construct structured formal queries from keywords. The authors propose a new process where they introduce a novel context-based query autocompletion feature to help the users to construct their keywords query by suggesting queries given prefixes. They also address the problem of context-based generating formal queries by exploiting user's query history, where previous queries can be used as contextual information for generating a new query. With the first tests, the authors' approach achieved encouraging results.