A review of ranking approaches for semantic search on Web

• An exhaustive review of ranking approaches for semantic search on Web.
• We identified three stages of ranking in semantic search process.
• We identified criteria for the comparison of semantic search approaches.
• We examined some open issues relevant to efficient semantic search.

With ever increasing information being available to the end users, search engines have become the most powerful tools for obtaining useful information scattered on the Web. However, it is very common that even most renowned search engines return result sets with not so useful pages to the user. Research on semantic search aims to improve traditional information search and retrieval methods where the basic relevance criteria rely primarily on the presence of query keywords within the returned pages. This work is an attempt to explore different relevancy ranking approaches based on semantics which are considered appropriate for the retrieval of relevant information. In this paper, various pilot projects and their corresponding outcomes have been investigated based on methodologies adopted and their most distinctive characteristics towards ranking. An overview of selected approaches and their comparison by means of the classification criteria has been presented. With the help of this comparison, some common concepts and outstanding features have been identified.