Combining Meta Data and Document Search with Spreading Activation for Semantic Desktop Search
Proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer Verlag, (June 2008)Abstract
The Semantic Desktop is a means to support users in Personal Information Management (PIM). It provides an excellent test bed for Semantic Web technology: resources (e. g., persons, projects, messages, documents) are distributed amongst multiple systems, ontologies are used to link and annotate them. Finding information is a core element in PIM. For the end user, the search interface has to be intuitive to use, natural language queries provide a simple mean to express requests. State of the art semantic search engines focus on metadata search or on semantic document retrieval. We combine both approaches to search the Semantic Desktop exploiting all available information, where we build on semantic teleporting and spreading activation. This combination is able to answer queries with instances, subgraphs of the knowledge base, and with relevant documents. We evaluated our approach on ESWC 2007 data in comparison with Google site search.
