A method for determining ontology-based semantic relevance

Abstract

The semantic web is based on ontologies and metadata that indexes resources using ontologies. This indexing is called annotation. Ontology based information retrieval is an operation that matches the relevance of an annotation or a user generated query against an ontology-based knowledge-base. Typically systems utilising ontology-based knowledge-bases are semantic portals that provide search facilities over the annotations. Handling large answer sets require effective methods to rank the search results based on relevance to the query or annotation. A method for determining such relevance is a pre-requisite for effective ontology-based information retrieval. This paper presents a method for determining relevance between two annotations. The method considers essential features of domain ontologies and RDF(S) languages to support determining this relevance. As a novel use case, the method was used to implement a knowledge-based recommendation system. A user study showing promising results was conducted. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.