Supporting semantic web search and structured queries on mobile devices

DESSI, ANDREA;Maxi,a A;ATZORI, MAURIZIO;Zaniolo, C.

2014-01-01

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Abstract

There has been much recent interest in user-friendly interfaces that support queries and searching the Semantic Web, without requiring knowledge of sparql and the internal structure used by DBpedia or other knowledge bases. Although powerful, the existing proposals assume the use of desktop computers featuring rather large displays and pointing devices such as a mouse or trackpad. In this paper we tackle the problem of querying and searching the Semantic Web from mobile devices, by taking full advantage of their small touch-enabled screens. We focus on a user-friendly interface that can be used from smartphones, mini tablets, smart watches and possibly other wearable computers such as Google Glass. Indeed existing approaches become much less usable and effective on mobile since these support and require different modalities of user interaction. Our proposal is based on an adaptation of the recently proposed concept of SBE query system, developing a novel mobile interface that allows both browsing and querying the Semantic Web without using sparql nor knowledge of the underlying ontology/schema of the supporting knowledge base. To demonstrate the properties of the proposed interface we have developed QPedia1 , a mobile app that allows to take full advantages of DBpedia through our mobile-enabled userfriendly interface.