A Hybrid Approach to Retrieving Web Documents and Semantic Web Data

The Semantic Web has been evolving into a property-linked web of RDF data, conceptually divorced from (but physically housed in) the World Wide Web of hyperlinked documents. Data Retrieval techniques are typically used to retrieve data from the Semantic Web while Information Retrieval techniques are used to retrieve documents from the Hypertext Web. Conceptually unifying the two webs enables the exploitation of their interconnections resulting in benefits to both data and document retrieval. Towards this end, we present the Unified Web model that integrates the two webs and formalizes the structure and the semantics of their interconnections. We present a hybrid approach to retrieving data and documents that is enabled by this unification. We specify the Hybrid Query Language that embodies the approach and the system SITAR that implements it