1. On navigating to the semantic search page, you will see the following search prompt at the top of the page, similar to that found in other search engines.

2. Placing the cursor in the search prompt, a list of possible criteria appear. All you have to do is select “Author” from the list or type the first characters from the chosen criteria, followed by the TAB key.

3. Once a criteria like “Author” is chosen, you are presented with a list containing the values possible for that criteria. Again, you can choose from the list using the cursor, or type the first few characters from your choice and press the TAB key once you reach your preferred choice.

4. Here, we choose the imaginary author “X”, but note that no such author exists. No results would normally be retrieved, but for the sake of example, we assume that X has authored a number of documents.

Now, in the red box “Thesaurus cloud” can be seen the main topics addressed by X. The size and weight of the text gives a visual clue as to the importance X gives to the topic in their documents. But the search can be further refined..

5. The search prompt invites you to choose another criteria. In this example case, the year is to be chosen. It can be chosen by selecting “Year” from the list, or typing “y” followed by the TAB key.

6. As was the case for the author criteria, a list of possible values for the year is presented for your choice. You can choose with the mouse or type in the year directly, pressing the TAB key once complete. Although only one item can be selected, the same criteria can be repeated as many times as you wish, as described for “Author” above.

7. The answer to the question “What are the main topics addressed by MP. X. in 2012?” has now been answered in the thesaurus cloud shown in the red box below. It is followed by a list of documents with a percentage indicating to what extent the document matches the search criteria (highest first).