  Archived collections of documents (like newspaper and web archives) serve as
important information sources in a variety of disciplines, including Digital
Humanities, Historical Science, and Journalism. However, the absence of
efficient and meaningful exploration methods still remains a major hurdle in
the way of turning them into usable sources of information. A semantic layer is
an RDF graph that describes metadata and semantic information about a
collection of archived documents, which in turn can be queried through a
semantic query language (SPARQL). This allows running advanced queries by
combining metadata of the documents (like publication date) and content-based
semantic information (like entities mentioned in the documents). However, the
results returned by such structured queries can be numerous and moreover they
all equally match the query. In this paper, we deal with this problem and
formalize the task of "ranking archived documents for structured queries on
semantic layers". Then, we propose two ranking models for the problem at hand
which jointly consider: i) the relativeness of documents to entities, ii) the
timeliness of documents, and iii) the temporal relations among the entities.
The experimental results on a new evaluation dataset show the effectiveness of
the proposed models and allow us to understand their limitations
