The Query Construction Interface for Analogous Information Retrieval

Today's web search engines, such as Google, MSN, yahoo, and amazon are generally work on a keyword search interface and a variety of statistical methods to catch users’ information needs. This query construction approach has been highly successful, as it is proven to be very intuitive and easy even for native web users. However, keyword search lacks the expressiveness to make use of the rich semantics in the Semantic Web. In order to construct a valid query to retrieve desired information, a user has to not only grasp the query language, but also understand the ontology thoroughly so as to find the right concepts and structures to form the query. Such a query construction process is complex and laborious. The work of the Semantics on Web is to equip the web with machine-process able and machine-understandable semantics, so that the Web can become a universal medium of information and knowledge exchange for both computer and human being. It can be foreseen that in the near future a lot of information on the Web will be described or annotated using these similar word, resulting in a huge knowledge base. Question arises how to utilize such rich and highly related words to improve the information seeking on the Semantic Web is becoming increasingly important. The Keyword Search approach makes it easy and the freely usable at the price of query expressiveness. This paper presents IQP�a novel approach to bridge the gap between usability of keyword search and expressiveness of database queries. IQP enables a user to start with an arbitrary keyword query and incrementally refine it into a structured query through an interactive interface.