Chapter 6. Discovering Information
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."
Information discovery concerns the different ways we can find information that is stored in RDF statements. There is no single method for locating information in the Semantic Web that works in all situations. Depending upon whether we know exactly what we are searching for and where the data might exist, and if we are aware of how the data is structured, we could discover the answers through navigation, searching, or querying.
Navigation is the simplest form of information discovery, where we have a tool to retrieve and visualize RDF data and, triple by triple, we dereference URIs to locate additional triples with no particular plan or goal in mind. Dereferencing a URI is the process of requesting and receiving a URI resource's representation (for example, a web page). This process repeats until we run out of triples or inclination. When we navigate, we may or may not be concerned with finding an answer because we might not have a question in mind; navigation can be thought of as free discovery. Semantic Web browsers are one means of navigation and will be explored in this chapter.
Searching builds on navigation by not only having a goal, such as searching for information on Chinese restaurants, but also relying upon more than just our navigation tool to find information manually. Searching doesn't have to be limited to search engines, although ...
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