This presentation was given at the SSW workshop, collocated with VLDB 2012. Exploratory search applications upon structured Web content is becoming one of the main information seeking paradigms for users. This is mainly due to the move towards mobile and pervasive Web access and to the more and more tight intertwining between everyday life and information seeking. Structured data is typically distributed on the Web and accessible through a service-oriented paradigm. This paper proposes a vision on: (1) a semantically-enabled service registration framework for describing in a Web data services in a convenient way; and (2) a design method for applications that exploit such model using a design pattern -based method.

1. Exploratory Search upon
Semantically Described
Web Data Sources
Marco Brambilla
Politecnico di Milano
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
marcobrambi
SSW workshop @ VLDB 2012, Istanbul, Turkey

2. Outline
• Context
• Search Services Specification
• Description
• Semantic Annotation
• Exploratory Search
• Design patterns
• Demo
• Outlook

3. Context
Web is a huge, heterogeneous data source:
 Structured, unstructured and semi-structured data
 Known problems of trust, reputation, consistency
User needs to solve real-life problems, not to find a web site

4. Context
Google? Well, yes… an “interesting” system

5. Context
User needs to solve real-life problems, not to find a web site
 Web queries get increasingly complex and specialized
 Exploratory search
 From document search to object search
Search as a service
 Viability of systems based upon search service orchestration

6. What are search services?
• APIs over Web data sources
• Structured data
• Domain-specific
• Wrapping of information utility sites

7. How can we use them?
• Applying complex queries (also with “joins”)
“… search for upcoming concerts close to an attractive location (like a
beach, lake, mountain, natural park, and so on), considering also availability
of good, close-by hotels …”

8. Background: semantic multi-domain search
“… expand the search to get information about available restaurants near
the candidate concert locations, news associated to the event and possible
options to combine further events …”

9. Liquid Query: Query Submission
Example Scenario 1: Trip planner for events
Concert Hotels
query conditions query conditions

10. Liquid Query: Query Execution

11. Liquid Query: alternative visualizations
and domain-independent platform
Example Scenario 2: Scientific Publication search

12. Problem 1: Service specification
• No service description per se
• Focused on search
• Ranking aware
• Description
• Bottom-up
• Based on the service interface
• Annotation
• Relying on an external reference knowledge base

13. SDF and SAF
Service Description (SDF) vs. Service Annotation (SAF)

14. Example of SDF instances

15. The registration of services
Bottom-up approach from the service signatures
Registration process fully specified and implemented
• Starts from SI details (name, type of service, etc.) and SI field
details, i.e. name, data type and I/O directionality
• the name and I/O fields of the SI are scanned with NLP and
Semantic techniques in order to identify the most suitable
Domain Diagram items to represent them
• The expert user's intervention is required to provide a
feedback concerning system-hypothesized mappings
• When all mappings have been validated, a newly created
Access Pattern and its corresponding Service Mart are
committed
See demo video at: http://search-computing.it/registration_demo

16. Example of resulting service mart
• A set of predefined combinations of services, to be
reused for specific cases

17. Problem 2: Reduce flexibility
Maximum flexibility over huge amounts of search services is not always the
best solution
 People want straightforward paths and want to be quick
 Commercial implementations are likely to be on fixed sets of domains and
fixed exploration directions

18. Design Patterns
• A set of blueprint combinations of services, to be
reused for different cases
• Very much like UML design patterns or datamart
patterns

19. Design Patterns – some examples
• Sequence

20. Design Patterns – some examples
• Star

21. Design Patterns – integrated examples
• Join

22. Design Patterns – integrated examples
• Join

23. Exploration implementation
• Not just a matter of data sources
• Also: data visualization, user interface specification,
usability, ..
See demo videos at:
http://demo.search-computing.net/night_planner_demo/seco/seco.html
http://demo.search-computing.net/new_job_demo/seco/seco.html

24. Problem 3 - Outlook
When dealing with real-life problems, people do not trust the web
completely
 Want to go back to discussion with people
 Expect insights, opinions, reassurance
 Exploratory search must be blended with social-network based
recommendations and inputs

25. Social Search: increasing quality in search
• From exploratory search to friends and experts feedback
Initial
query
Exploration
Exploratory step Human
Search Search
System System
Exploration
step
System API Social API
Database / Crowd /
IR index Community

26. Example: Find your job (social invitation)
Selected data items
can be transferred
to the crowd question

27. Find your job (response submission)

28. Conclusions and future work
Well, I’ve shown everything..
See our papers at WWW 2010 (Liquid Query) and WWW 2012
(CrowdSearcher)
Future work
• More experiments (e.g., vs. sociality of users, vs. crowds, …)
• Not only search: active integration of web structured data and
social sensors
Some ads
• Search Computing book series (Springer LNCS)
• Workshop Very Large Data Search at VLDB
• VLDB Journal special issue (deadline Sept 2012)

29. Thanks!
Questions?
Marco Brambilla
marco.brambilla@polimi.it
marcobrambi