Semantic Full-Text Search with ESTER: Scalable, Easy, Fast

Abstract

We present a demo of ESTER, a search engine that combines the ease of use, speed and scalability of full-text search with the powerful semantic capabilities of ontologies. ESTER supports full-text queries, ontological queries and combinations of these, yet its interface is as easy as can be: A standard search field with semantic information provided interactively as one types. ESTER works by reducing all queries to two basic operations: prefix search and join, which can be implemented very efficiently in terms of both processing time and index space.We demonstrate the capabilities of ESTER on a combination of the English Wikipedia with the Yago ontology, with response times below 100 milliseconds for most queries, and an index size of about 4 GB. The system can be run both stand-alone and as a Web application.