The idea of the Semantic Web provides new opportunities for semantically-enabled user interfaces. The explicit representation of the meaning of data allows us to (1) transcend traditional keyboard and mouse interaction metaphors, and (2) provide representation structures for more complex interaction scenarios that aim to address semantic information sources.

In this talk I will give an overview of DFKI's Semantic Dialogue Shell developed in the context of the THESEUS project. THESEUS is the German flagship project on the Internet of Services, where the user can delegate complex tasks to dynamically composed semantic web services by utilising multimodal interaction.

Over the last years, we have adhered strictly to the developed rule "No presentation without representation." The idea is to implement a generic, and semantic, dialogue shell that can be configured for and applied to domain-specific dialogue applications. The dialogue system also acts as the middleware between the clients and the backend services. The spoken dialogue input is used to generate SPARQL queries to address information sources such as DBpedia, Yago, or YouTube. The backend system also integrates multiple Linked Data sources.

We will describe our semantic search architecture in two specific use-case scenarios: In the first scenario, a user is interested in music and is able to retrieve musician's information using natural speech. In the second use case scenario, we examine first ideas on the applicability of Linked Data, in particular a subset of the Linked Open Drug Data (LODD), to connect radiology, human anatomy, and drug information for improved medical image annotation and subsequent search. We will explain this with an example in the THESEUS use case Medico.

Whereas the dialogue-based access to keyword-based search engines has only moderate success, semantic (ontology-based) interpretations of dialogue utterances may become the key advancement in semantic search, thereby mediating and addressing dynamic semantic search engines which are already freely available.