Methodology and campaign design for the evaluation of semantic search tools

Abstract

The main problem with the state of the art in the semantic search domain is the lack of comprehensive evaluations. There exist only a few efforts to evaluate semantic search tools and to compare the results with other evaluations of their kind. In this paper, we present a systematic approach for testing and benchmarking semantic search tools that was developed within the SEALS project. Unlike other semantic web evaluations our methodology tests search tools both automatically and interactively with a human user in the loop. This allows us to test not only functional performance measures, such as precision and recall, but also usability issues, such as ease of use and comprehensibility of the query language. The paper describes the evaluation goals and assumptions; the criteria and metrics; the type of experiments we will conduct as well as the datasets required to conduct the evaluation in the context of the SEALS initiative. To our knowledge it is the first effort to present a comprehensive evaluation methodology for Semantic Web search tools.