Searching in semantically rich linked data: a case study in cultural heritage

Traditionally the relations between concepts from a controlled vocabulary, such as the hierarchical and associative relations in a thesaurus, have been used to support users in their search process. In the context of the Semantic Web, multiple interlinked vocabularies are becoming available, providing a large number of different relations between concepts. However, for a specific search task, only a small fraction of these will be meaningful to the user, and currently we have little understanding of which methods can be used to determine this. In this paper, we describe a case study in the cultural heritage domain that investigates support for the specific task of finding artworks in a data set of multiple linked art collections and vocabularies. In a first experiment a number of use cases from domain experts are collected and the paths in the data graph by which artworks can be found are analysed. A number of different types of paths are identified and their usefulness is qualitatively evaluated. In a second experiment we explore how the different path types can be used in a semantic search algorithm to support the intended search behavior indicated by the experts. We conclude that effective end-user support requires a highly interactive application in which the user can explore multiple search strategies. Based on our findings we discuss the implications on the design of such an interactive search application.