Talking to the Semantic Web – Query Interfaces to Ontologies for the Casual User

The Semantic Web presents the vision of a dynamically growing knowledge base that should allow users to draw on and combine distributed information sources specified in languages based on formal logic. Common users, however, were shown to have problems even with the simplest Boolean expressions [4]; the use of the logic formalism underlying the Semantic Web is beyond their understanding. So how can we bridge the gap between the logic-based SemanticWeb and real-world users, who are ill at ease and, oftentimes, unable to use formal logic concepts?

An often proposed solution to address this problem is the use of natural language interfaces (NLIs). Most NLIs, however, only understand some subset of natural language (NL), but often suggest full understanding, which leads to confusing interaction with users [1]. This mismatch between the users’ expectations and the capabilities of a NLI is called the habitability problem [5]. Furthermore, the development of NL tools requires computationally intensive algorithms relying on large amounts of background knowledge making the tools highly domaindependent and inapplicable to new domains or applications [1].