Beyond graph search: Exploring and exploiting rich connected data sets

Modern Web data is highly structured in terms of entities and relations from large knowledge resources, geo-temporal references and social network structures, resulting in a massive multidimensional graph. This graph essentially unifies both the searcher and the information resources that played a fundamentally different role in traditional information retrieval. Graph search-based systems offer major new ways to access relevant information. Graph search affects both query formulation (complex queries about entities and relations building on the searcher’s context) as well as result exploration and discovery (slicing and dicing the information using the graph structure) in a completely novel way. This new graph based approach introduces great opportunities, but also great challenges, in terms of data quality and data integration, user interface design, and privacy.