Semantic search

Semantic search denotes search with meaning, as distinguished from lexical search where the search engine looks for literal matches of the query words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning of the query. Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding the searcher's intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Semantic search systems consider various points including context of search, location, intent, variation of words, synonyms, generalized and specialized queries, concept matching and natural language queries to provide relevant search results.

Some authors regard semantic search as a set of techniques for retrieving knowledge from richly structured data sources like ontologies and XML as found on the Semantic Web. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of domain knowledge at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify their intent in more detail at query time.

See also

• List of Semantic Search Engines
• Semantic web
• Semantic Unification
• Resource Description Framework
• Natural language search engine
• Semantic Query

Further reading

Several scientific events cover the topic of semantic search explicitly:

• Semantic Search 2008 Workshop at ESWC'08
• Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval at ECIR'08.