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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Talking to the Semantic Web - A Controlled English Query Interface for Ontologies
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Abraham Bernstein
  • Esther Kaufmann
  • Norbert E. Fuchs
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Journal Title AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin
Geographical Reach international
Volume 2
Number 1
Page Range 42 - 47
Date 2005
Abstract Text The semantic web presents the vision of a distributed, dynamically growing knowledge base founded on formal logic. Common users, however, seem to have problems even with the simplest Boolean expression. As queries from web search engines show, the great majority of users simply do not use Boolean expressions. So how can we help users to query a web of logic that they do not seem to understand? We address this problem by presenting a natural language front-end to semantic web querying. The front-end allows formulating queries in Attempto Controlled English (ACE), a subset of natural English. Each ACE query is translated into a discourse representation structure – a variant of the language of first-order logic – that is then translated into the semantic web querying language PQL. As examples show, our approach offers great potential for bridging the gap between the semantic web and its real-world users, since it allows users to query the semantic web without having to learn an unfamiliar formal language.
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