View article

The search for information on the Web of Data is becoming increasingly difficult due to its dramatic growth. Especially novice users need to acquire both knowledge about the underlying ontology structure and proficiency in formulating formal queries (e. g. SPARQL queries) to retrieve information from Linked Data sources. So as to simplify and automate the querying and retrieval of information from such sources, we present in this paper a novel approach for constructing SPARQL queries based on user-supplied keywords. Our approach utilizes a set of predefined basic graph pattern templates for generating adequate interpretations of user queries. This is achieved by obtaining ranked lists of candidate resource identifiers for the supplied keywords and then injecting these identifiers into suitable positions in the graph pattern templates. The main advantages of our approach are that it is completely agnostic of the …