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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2585–2589Cite as

Ontology Visual Querying

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Definition

An ontology definition language provides constructs that can be used to describe concepts and the relationships in which they participate. Because such languages define the properties concepts can exhibit, they can be used to restrict the questions that can meaningfully be asked about the concepts. Given a specification of the questions that can legitimately be asked, a user interface can direct query construction tasks towards meaningful requests, which in turn are expected to yield non-empty answers. Thus ontology visual querying is the use of an ontology to direct interactive query construction. A related topic is faceted browsing, in which the incremental description of concepts of interest is closely integrated with retrieval, thereby providing information about the results of a request as it is being constructed.

Historical Background

The history of visual query languages is almost as long as that of textual query languages, with Query-by-Example [14] developed in...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Sean Bechhofer & Norman W. Paton

Authors
  1. Sean Bechhofer
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  2. Norman W. Paton
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sean Bechhofer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale, Universita di Roma, Roma, 185, Italy

    Tiziana Catarci

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Bechhofer, S., Paton, N.W. (2018). Ontology Visual Querying. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_256

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