Entity search: building bridges between two worlds

We consider the task of entity search and examine to which extent state-of-art information retrieval (IR) and semantic web (SW) technologies are capable of answering information needs that focus on entities. We also explore the potential of combining IR with SW technologies to improve the end-to-end performance on a specific entity search task. We arrive at and motivate a proposal to combine text-based entity models with semantic information from the Linked Open Data cloud.