A semantic federated search engine for domain-specific document retrieval

Retrieval of domain-specific documents became attractive for the Semantic Web community due to the possibility of integrating classic Information Retrieval (IR) techniques with semantic knowledge. Unfortunately, the gap between the construction of a full semantic search engine and the possibility of exploiting a repository of ontologies covering all possible domains is far from being filled. Recent solutions focused on the aggregation of different domain-specific repositories managed by third-parties. In this paper, we present a semantic federated search engine developed in the context of the EEXCESS EU project. Through the developed platform, users are able to perform federated queries over repositories in a transparent way, i.e. without knowing how their original queries are transformed before being actually submitted. The platform implements a facility for plugging new repositories and for creating, with the support of general purpose knowledge bases, knowledge graphs describing the content of each connected repository. Such knowledge graphs are then exploited for enriching queries performed by users.