Historical Queries on Wikipedia: A Usability-Driven Approach

The extraordinary success of Wikipedia shows that major advances in Web document searching and knowledge retrieval can be achieved once powerful structured queries on RDF knowledge bases will be supported by semantic-web information systems. Significant research progress on the usability front is being made by two main approaches. One is the Swipe approach, where casual users can pose powerful structured queries by entering QBE-like conditions on the system-activated infoboxes of pages of entities that exemplify those that are the subject of the query. This approach allows users to ask structured queries of significant complexity combined with free-text and keyword search conditions, and can therefore return structured answers along with the snippets of pages of interest. The other approach that has seen much progress is Question Answering (QA) systems. QA provides the solution of choice for users seeking short answers to simple questions formulated in Natural Language, often through voice-recognition interfaces.