Section: New Results

Discovery Hub

Participants : Nicolas Marie, Fabien Gandon, Damien Legrand.

Nicolas Marie is PhD student in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs (Cifre). He is the project leader of Discovery Hub: a discovery engine on the top of DBpedia using real-time spreading activation.

We continue the CRE and CIFRE PhD Thesis (2011-2013) initially on Social objects, object-centered sociality, and object-centered social networks to propose mobile context-based notification application in a semantic and pervasive Web. The work evolved toward exploratory search, discovery and recommendation. Web growth, both in size and diversity, and users’ growing expectations increase the need for innovative search approaches and technologies. Exploratory search systems are built specifically to help user in cognitive consuming search tasks like learning or investigation. Some of these systems are built on the top of linked data and use its semantic richness to provide cognitively-optimized search experiences. This work addresses the question of real-time linked data processing for exploratory search purposes. This live aspect offers advantages in terms of query expressivity and data dynamicity-handling.

To achieve this goal we propose a real-time semantic spreading activation algorithm (RTSA) which process linked data on-the-fly. This live aspect offers advantages in data dynamicity handling and query expressivity. Approximation strategies, algorithm behavior study and user evaluation related to RTSA algorithm are currently performed. The work includes a study of its behavior on DBpedia and a validation of its relevance through a user evaluation. Finally we also implemented a real deployment introducing the Discovery Hub prototype. It is an exploratory search engine offering advanced querying, browsing and explanation strategies for discovery purposes.

This algorithm is deployed in the Discovery Hub prototype (http://semreco.inria.fr/ ), a discovery engine interfaced with services. Discovery Hub aims to help users to make numerous discoveries starting from its interests. The application works on DBpedia data including local version like fr.dbpedia.org (hosted by Inria/Wimmics). It also makes extensive use of the Corese/KGRAM Semantic Web Factory. Application front-end was designed and developed by Damien Legrand during an internship.

The application was presented during the Semanticpedia day, organized by official French language delegation (http://www.dglflf.culture.gouv.fr/Actualites/Programme_Semanticpedia.pdf ).

Nicolas Marie is also active in the Web Science community [36] .