Employing a domain specific ontology to perform semantic search

Abstract

Increasing the relevancy of Web search results has been a major concern in research over the last years. Boolean search, metadata, natural language based processing and various other techniques have been applied to improve the quality of search results sent to a user. Ontology-based methods were proposed to refine the information extraction process but they have not yet achieved wide adoption by search engines. This is mainly due to the fact that the ontology building process is time consuming. An all inclusive ontology for the entire World Wide Web might be difficult if not impossible to construct, but a specific domain ontology can be automatically built using statistical and machine learning techniques, as done with our tool: SeseiOnto. In this paper, we describe how we adapted the SeseiOnto software to perform Web search on the Wikipedia page on climate change. SeseiOnto, by using conceptual graphs to represent natural language and an ontology to extract links between concepts, manages to properly answer natural language queries about climate change. Our tests show that SeseiOnto has the potential to be used in domain specific Web search as well as in corporate intranets. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.