An approach for the ranking of query results in the Semantic Web

Abstract

One of the vital problems in the searching for information is the ranking of the retrieved results, because users make typically very short queries (2-3 terms) and tend to consider only the first ten results. In traditional IR approaches the relevance of the results is determined only by analysing the underlying information repository (content and hyperlink structure), which leads to the weak relevance model. On the other hand, in the Semantic Web the querying process is supported by an ontology such that other important sources for determining the relevance of results can be considered: the structure of the underlying domain and the characteristics of the searching process. In this paper we present a novel approach for determining relevance in ontology-based searching for information, which exploits the "full potential" of the semantics of such a semantically-based link structure. We present several analyses about how a Semantic Web querying mechanism can benefit of using our ranking approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelderg 2003.