Roberto De Virgilio – författare

Databases have been designed to store large volumes of data and to provide efficient query interfaces. Semantic Web formats are geared towards capturing domain knowledge, interlinking annotations, and offering a high-level, machine-processable view of information. However, the gigantic amount of such useful information makes efficient management of it increasingly difficult, undermining the possibility of transforming it into useful knowledge.

The research presented by De Virgilio, Giunchiglia and Tanca tries to bridge the two worlds in order to leverage the efficiency and scalability of database-oriented technologies to support an ontological high-level view of data and metadata. The contributions present and analyze techniques for semantic information management, by taking advantage of the synergies between the logical basis of the Semantic Web and the logical foundations of data management. The book’s leitmotif is to propose models and methods especially tailored to represent and manage data that is appropriately structured for easier machine processing on the Web.

After two introductory chapters on data management and the Semantic Web in general, the remaining contributions are grouped into five parts on Semantic Web Data Storage, Reasoning in the Semantic Web, Semantic Web Data Querying, Semantic Web Applications, and Engineering Semantic Web Systems. The handbook-like presentation makes this volume an important reference on current work and a source of inspiration for future development, targeting academic and industrial researchers as well as graduate students in Semantic Web technologies or database design.

The Web has become the world’s largest database, with search being the main tool that allows  organizations and individuals to exploit its huge amount of information. Search on the Web has been traditionally based on textual and structural similarities, ignoring to a large degree the semantic dimension, i.e., understanding the meaning of the query and of the document content. Combining search and semantics gives birth to the idea of semantic search. Traditional search engines have already advertised some semantic dimensions. Some of them, for instance, can enhance their generated result sets with documents that are semantically related to the query terms even though they may not include these terms. Nevertheless, the exploitation of the semantic search has not yet reached its full potential.

In this book, Roberto De Virgilio, Francesco Guerra and Yannis Velegrakis present an extensive overview of the work done in Semantic Search and other related areas. They explore different technologies and solutions in depth, making their collection a valuable and stimulating reading for both academic and industrial researchers.

The book is divided into three parts. The first introduces the readers to the basic notions of the Web of Data. It describes the different kinds of data that exist, their topology, and their storing and indexing techniques. The second part is dedicated to Web Search. It presents different types of search, like the exploratory or the path-oriented, alongside methods for their efficient and effective implementation. Other related topics included in this part are the use of uncertainty in query answering, the exploitation of ontologies, and the use of semantics in mashup design and operation. The focus of the third part is on linked data, and more specifically, on applying ideas originating in recommender systems on linked data management, and on techniques for the efficiently querying answering on linkeddata.