Andreas Blumauer

Industry

A Five-Star Rating System for Semantic Search

Search is this category of applications which is addressed by vendors of semantic technologies most frequently. Since 'Semantic search' serves only as a general paraphrase for search beyond full-text search, the offered functionalities, used technologies, and resulting advantages can vary widely.

While most methods of text mining have traditionally facilitated semantic search for documents, linked data protagonists also propagate the paradigm shift towards a 'semantic search for knowledge'.

Is this kind of semantic search which goes beyond 'searching for documents' the only 'true' semantic search? What are the use case scenarios, which benefit most from search applications based on linked data and knowledge graphs?

Following the 5-star rating system for linked open data by Tim Berners-Lee, we will present a model which helps to classify the various forms of semantic search. For each of the categories we will give concrete examples and we will discuss technological approaches.

Starting with some advanced features to improve search for documents like auto-complete or query expansion, we will continue with the examination of various forms of search assistants (like search facets) and contextualization based on knowledge graphs. Finally we will explain why the highest rating is given only to search systems based on SPARQL. 

Attendees of this talk will receive a comprehensive overview over the state-of-the-art of semantic search technologies and they will learn how to classify them. Upcoming trends in this sector like the usage of knowledge graphs, linked data and SPARQL will be illustrated by specific examples.

CV

Andreas Blumauer has studied business informatics at Vienna University of Economics and Business and at Vienna University of Technology and has obtained a Master's degree in business studies. 

Andreas is co-founder and managing partner at Semantic Web Company and responsible for various consulting projects as well as for the product management of PoolParty Semantic Suite. He is lecturer at Danube University Krems in the areas of knowledge management systems, social software and semantic technologies.

Andreas Blumauer has been a pioneer in the area of the semantic web since 2002, he is co-editor and editor of one of the first comprehensive books in the area of the semantic web for the German speaking community. tHe is an experienced consultant in the area of collaborative systems, linked data and semantic technologies.

He has been working on the specification and optimisation of PoolParty technology platform (http://www.poolparty.biz) - a software suite to develop applications on top of linked data, and semantic web standards.tttt