First Experiences with an Ontology-Based Search for Environmental Data

Abstract. This paper reports on first experiences with an ontology-based search for environmental data in a productive database. We show in a test case how the system supports a user in answering questions that arise in daily business. Because of the complex structure of the process-oriented database the implementation was quite challenging but successful. The use of a domain ontology composed of two component ontologies in German and French proves to be the right design decision in a bilingual context. The presented approach is discussed in relation to existing work. It is concluded that the search space must be extended before evaluating the system by comparing measures like recall and precision with a benchmark.