Is There Anything Worth Finding on the Semantic Web?

Published Version

Preview

PDF (591Kb)

Abstract

There has recently been an upsurge of interest in the possibilities of combining structured data and ad-hoc information retrieval from traditional hypertext. In this experiment, we run queries extracted from a query log of a major search engine against the Semantic Web to discover if the Semantic Web has anything of interest to the average user. We show that there is indeed much information on the Semantic Web that could be relevant for many queries for people, places and even abstract concepts, although they are overwhelmingly clustered around a Semantic Web-enabled export of Wikipedia known as DBPedia. to a more specialized search engine. We use a search query log of approximately 15 million distinct queries from Microsoft Live Search. This query log contains 14,921,285 queries. Of these queries, 7,095,302 (47.55%) were unique, and corrected for capitalization, 6,623,635 (44.39%) were unique.