Graphical Query Results page

This topic provides a brief overview of the functionality of the web page displaying the results of graphical queries.

The results page

The results from a query formulated with the graphical interface of the Semantic Search Engine are displayed in a new web page. A screenshot of this web page displaying the results of a refined query searching for software tool objects is shown below:

Following links in the page

There is not much you can do in the results page. You can, however, click on each of the displayed objects to get more details (after all, an object name does not necessarily expose the necessary information). After clicking on one of the displayed links you get the following picture.

Much more information is displayed in this page for the selected object. What is perhaps even more useful is that you can continue browsing by clicking on the various links presented in this page as well. You can basically explore all associations of the object presented in the page with any other objects for which such an association exists.

You can thus explore the entire repository if you wish; of course, proceeding more than two links away will rarely be necessary. What is important is that you can get a good idea of what are the results your search has retrieved.

Browsing instances of the class

There is another option in the results page besides more thoroughly exploring the various result objects. You can instead browse all objects associated with the concept you are searching for. This essentially removes all constraints on the query you submitted and retrieves all objects for the concept described in the default query node of the query tree.

In this example, the concept we searched for is Software Tool and we can retrieve all software tools in the repository by clicking on the Browse link as shown below:

A reason why you would want to retrieve all available objects, after probably taking the time to create several restrictions for your query, is that your query might not produce any results - or even the expected results. By retrieving all available results you are making sure that there are some results to retrieve and verifying that your query asks what you intended.