A User Interface for Semantic Full Text Search

We present a powerful and comfortable interactive web user interface for semantic full-text search. It combines and extends established components of other search user interfaces - namely keyword search, facets, proposals and breadcrumbs - in a new way. The result is a reasonably easy to use semantic search application that assists its users in an incremental creation of semantic queries, without requiring them to have knowledge about any special query language or the underlying ontology. The user interface provides only a single input field as it is also common for current keyword search applications like Google. When something is typed, it automatically shows different proposals for words, relations, entities, or semantic classes that are used to build the search query. When any of the proposals is selected, it is added to the query which is displayed as a tree in an advanced breadcrumbs panel. With the help of the breadcrumbs panel, the query can easily be extended or changed by adding new proposals or replacing or deleting already existing parts. The provided proposals are context sensitive with respect to the current query to support users in the incremental creation of meaningful queries. The hits for the current query are always automatically displayed together with evidence why they suit to the query.

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