Constructing understandable explanations for semantic search results

Abstract

MEDICO aims to develop an intelligent, robust, and scalable semantic search engine for medical images. The search engine of the MEDICO demonstrator RadSem is based on formal ontologies and designated for different kinds of users such as medical doctors or patients. An explanation facility integrated into RadSem justifies search results by showing a connection between query and result. The constructed explanations are depicted as semantic networks containing various medical concepts and labels. This paper addresses the tailoring of justifications to different kinds of users regarding such quality aspects as understandability or amount of information. A user experiment shows that under certain conditions the quality of justifications can be pre-estimated by considering the usage frequency of medical terms in natural language. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.