The Path is the Destination - Enabling a New Search Paradigm with Linked Data

Today, searching the World Wide Web in most cases turns out in looking for a specific item, which means that the user should know the item in advance. In the future internet, searching for information comes closer to the notion of ’window shopping’ by means of exploratory and semantic search technologies. In the course of the exploratory search process the user constantly receives new information and establishes a personalized knowledge base. To make this possible, semantic search technologies utilize domain knowledge and semantic data, as e.g., Linked Open Data (LOD), to expand and refine search results, to derive cross-references, and to reveal implicitly hidden semantic relations. Implementing semantic exploratory search requires various issues have to be solved including mapping text to semantic entities, detecting and cleaning inconsistencies in available LOD, ranking algorithms for semantic data and heuristics for recommendations, as well as appropriate visualizations of complex semantic relationships. This paper describes how LOD can be utilized to enable exploratory search systems for the future internet.