A Semantic Web Based Search Engine with X3D Visualisation of Queries and Results

Parts of this PhD have been published: Gkoutzis, Konstantinos, and Vladimir Geroimenko. "Moving from Folksonomies to Taxonomies: Using the Social Web and 3D to Build an Unlimited Semantic Ontology." Proceedings of the 2011 15th International Conference on Information Visualisation. IEEE Computer Society, 2011.The Semantic Web project has introduced new techniques for managing information. Data can now be organised more efficiently and in such a way that computers can take advantage of the relationships that characterise the given input to present more relevant output. Semantic Web based search engines can quickly educe exactly what is needed to be found and retrieve it while avoiding information overload. Up until now, search engines have interacted with their users by asking them to look for words and phrases. We propose the creation of a new generation Semantic Web search engine that will offer a visual interface for queries and results. To create such an engine, information input must be viewed not merely as keywords, but as specific concepts and objects which are all part of the same universal system. To make the manipulation of the interconnected visual objects simpler and more natural, 3D graphics are utilised, based on the X3D Web standard, allowing users to semantically synthesise their queries faster and in a more logical way, both for them and the computer