Interactive Information Access on the Web of Data

The Web of data enables fragments of information to be identified, described and connected together in a rich information environment. Users requiring information are faced with the problem of finding out what information is available, and obtaining sufficient fragments to successfully carry out their task. Systems supporting these tasks can use the fragments, descriptions of them and relationships among them, to improve both the selection and presentation of the information. Questions to be answered are: which information needs can be better supported, and how can the Web of data help. While the construction of the linked data cloud'' is necessary to even start thinking about providing this type of support for users, our claim is that we first need to establish the user's information needs before establishing the potential roles the linked data can play in information selection and presentation. In this paper, we discuss potential uses of linked data to support users' information needs, give examples of using linked data to support user information seeking tasks and highlight future research directions.