Improving Web Information Retrieval using Ontologies: an Extension and Implementation of OWL for Web Queries Enrichment

The use of Semantic Web technology comes into general use these last years. This is all the more true concerning ontology languages. Moreover, since the standardization of the Web Ontology Language, ontologies designed using OWL are becoming numerous over the Web. Therefore, applications are needed to benefit from this phenomenon. In this paper, we will illustrate how OWL ontologies can improve Web information retrieval. First of all, we present the adaptation of existing OWL primitives to our “Optimal ontology-based Web Information Retrieval ” (O3) approach. We also discourse the integration of three new semantic relations into OWL in order to enrich O3. Subsequently, the definition of rigorous query expansion rules and consequential experimental results obtained using the TARGET prototype allows us to emphasize the contribution of OWL ontologies in our approach for improving Web documents’ relevance when searching the Web. 1