FacetOntology: Expressive Descriptions of Facets in the Semantic Web

The formal structure of the information on the Semantic Web lends itself to faceted browsing, an information retrieval method where users can filter results based on the values of properties (“facets”). Numerous faceted browsers have been created to browse RDF and Linked Data, but these systems use their own ontologies for defining how data is queried to populate their facets. Since the source data is the same format across these systems (specifically, RDF), we can unify the different methods of describing how to query the underlying data, to enable compatibility across systems, and provide an extensible base ontology for future systems. To this end, we present FacetOntology, an ontology that defines how to query data to form a faceted browser, and a number of transformations and filters that can be applied to data before it is shown to users. FacetOntology overcomes limitations in the expressivity of existing work, by enabling the full expressivity of SPARQL when selecting data for facets. By applying a

FacetOntology definition

to data, a set of facets are specified, each with queries and filters to source RDF data, which enables faceted browsing systems to be created using that RDF data.