Using Domain Ontologies for Efficient Information Retrieval

Being the conceptual models that capture domain knowledge, ontologies can be looked upon for aiding meaningful information retrieval. This paper is an effort to improve the relevancy of results in a search system for a domain by exploiting the domain knowledge captured in an OWL DL Ontology. We propose a system that fits the query terms in the ontology graph in an appropriate way and exploits the surrounding knowledge to derive an enhanced query. The enhanced query is given to the underlying basic keyword search system. The results thus obtained are ranked using our ranking algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first approach that tries to make use of more ontological knowledge than IS-A relationships and synonyms for information retrieval. As a result, we find that we can achieve substantial improvement in bot