Incremental End-user Query Construction for the Semantic Desktop

This paper describes the design and implementation of a user interface that allows end-users to incrementally construct a query over the information in the Personal Information Management (PIM) domain. It allows semantically enriched keyword queries, implemented in the Semantic Desktop of the NEPOMUK Project. The Semantic Desktop user is able to explicitly articulate machine-processable knowledge, as described by its metadata. Therefore, searching this semantic information space can also benefit from the knowledge articulation within the query. Contrary to keyword queries, where it is not possible to provide semantic information, structured query languages as SPARQL enable exploiting this knowledge explicitly.