GENESIS: a generic RDF data access interface

Abstract

The availability of billions of facts represented in RDF on the Web provides novel opportunities for data discovery and access. In particular, keyword search and question answering approaches enable even lay people to access this data. However, the interpretation of the results of these systems, as well as the navigation through these results, remains challenging. In this paper, we present Genesis, a generic RDF data access interface. Genesis can be deployed on top of any knowledge base and search engine with minimal effort and allows for the representation of RDF data in a layperson-friendly way. This is facilitated by the modular architecture for reusable components underlying our framework. Currently, these include a generic search back-end, together with corresponding interactive user interface components based on a service for similar and related entities as well as verbalization services to bridge between RDF and natural language.