Query Answer Reformulation over Knowledge Bases

The answer of a query, submitted to a database or a knowledge base, is often long and may contain redundant data. The user is frequently forced to browse through a long answer or refine and repeat the query until the answer reaches a manageable size. Without proper treatment, consuming the answer may indeed become a tedious task. This article then proposes a process that modifies the presentation of a query answer to improve the quality of the user’s experience in the context of an RDF knowledge base. The process reorganizes the original query answer by applying heuristics to summarize the results and to select template questions that create a user dialog that guides the presentation of the results. The article also includes experiments based on RDF versions of MusicBrainz, enriched with DBpedia data, and IMDb, each with over 200 million RDF triples. The experiments use sample queries from well-known benchmarks.