u APPLYING LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY TO ONTOLOGY-BASED QUERYING:

This paper addresses the issue of how language technology resources and components can be applied in ontology-based querying. In particular, it presents the approach to text and query analysis adopted in the Danish research project OntoQuery, where shallow syntactic analysis and ontology-based parsing are combined in order to identify nominal phrases (NPs) and assign them a semantic description. Semantic descriptions are used by the search engine to match queries against texts in a database, and a ranking of the texts retrieved is produced based on a domain ontology. This is intended to be a general methodology applicable to texts from different domains, including those relevant to cultural heritage, although OntoQuery has chosen nutrition as its first target domain. The paper focuses on the language technology aspects of the methodology, the ontology-based lexicon inherited from the SIMPLE project, and the development of the domain-specific ontology. The methodology is partly implemented in a prototype. ONTOLOGY-BASED QUERYING: WHY IT IS USEFUL Future growth in the areas of digital libraries and online searches in databases available on the Web stress the need for content-based extraction of information, where the content is eventually represented by means of ontologies of the relevant domains. The collaborative Danish research pro-ject OntoQuery is developing a methodology for ontology-based information retrieval (IR) where linguistic analysis, shaped on the basis of an ontology, is applied to queries and texts such as online documents and encyclopedias. The nutrition domain has been selected as a first test domain and is being modeled in our ontology from the perspective of a layman. In other words, the OntoQuery system is primarily intended to answer queries of the type on