Querying Linked Data Using Semantic Relatedness: A Vocabulary Independent Approach

Linked Data brings the promise of incorporating a new dimension to the Web where the availability of Web-scale data can determine a paradigmatic transformation of the Web and its applications. However, together with its opportunities, Linked Data brings inherent challenges in the way users and applications consume the available data. Users consuming Linked Data on the Web, or on corporate intranets, should be able to search and query data spread over potentially a large number of heterogeneous, complex and distributed datasets. Ideally, a query mechanism for Linked Data should abstract users from the representation of data. This work focuses on the investigation of a vocabulary independent natural language query mechanism for Linked Data, using an approach based on the combination of entity search, a Wikipedia-based semantic relatedness measure and spreading activation. The combination of these three elements in a query mechanism for Linked Data is a new contribution in the space. Wikipedia-based relatedness measures address existing limitations of existing works which are based on similarity measures/term expansion based on WordNet. Experimental results using the query mechanism to answer 50 natural language queries over DBPedia achieved a mean reciprocal rank of 61.4%, an average precision of 48.7% and average recall of 57.2%, answering 70% of the queries.