Report on the First SIGIR Workshop on Graph Search and Beyond (GSB'15)

Abstract

Modern Web data is highly structured in terms of entities and relations from large knowledge resources, geo-temporal references and social network structure, resulting in a massivemultidimensional graph. This graph essentially unifies both the searcher and the information resources that played a fundamentally different role in traditional IR, and "Graph Search" offers major new ways to access relevant information. Graph search affects both query formulation (complex queries about entities and relations building on the searcher's context) as well as result exploration and discovery (slicing and dicing the information using the graph structure) in a completely personalized way. This new graph based approach introduces great opportunities, but also great challenges, in terms of data quality and data integration, user interface design, and privacy. We view the notion of "graph search" as searching information from your personal point of view (you are the query) over a highly structured and curated information space. This goes beyond the traditional two-term queries and ten blue links results that users are familiar with, requiring a highly interactive session covering both query formulation and result exploration. The workshop brought together researchers from a range of areas in information access, who worked together on searching information from your personal point of view over a highly structured and curated information space.