Ad-hoc object retrieval in the web of data

Semantic Search refers to a loose set of concepts, challenges and techniques having to do with harnessing the information of the growing Web of Data (WoD) for Web search. Here we propose a formal model of one specific semantic search task: ad-hoc object retrieval. We show that this task provides a solid framework to study some of the semantic search problems currently tackled by commercial Web search engines. We connect this task to the traditional ad-hoc document retrieval and discuss appropriate evaluation metrics. Finally, we carry out a realistic evaluation of this task in the context of a Web search application.