This monograph provides an overview of the broad area of semantic search on text and knowledge bases. In a nutshell, semantic search is "search with meaning". This "meaning" can refer to various parts of the search process: understanding the query, understanding the-data, or representing knowledge in a way suitable for meaningful retrieval.

This open access book surveys the progress in addressing selected challenges related to the growth of big data in combination with increasingly complicated hardware.It emerged from a research program established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as priority program SPP 1736 on Algorithmics for Big Data where researchers from theoretical computer science worked together with application experts in order to tackle problems in domains such as networking, genomics research, and information retrieval. Such domains are unthinkable without substantial hardware and software support, and these...