An ontology-based approach to information retrieval

We define a general framework for ontology-based information retrieval (IR). In our approach, document and query expansion rely on a base taxonomy that is extracted from a lexical database or a Linked Data set (e.g. WordNet, Wiktionary etc.). Each term from a document or query is modelled as a vector of base concepts from the base taxonomy. We define a set of mapping functions which map multiple ontological layers (dimensions) onto the base taxonomy. This way, each concept from the included ontologies can also be represented as a vector of base concepts from the base taxonomy. We propose a general weighting schema which is used for the vector space model. Our framework can therefore take into account various lexical and semantic relations between terms and concepts (e.g. synonymy, hierarchy, meronymy, antonymy, geo-proximity, etc.). This allows us to avoid certain vocabulary problems (e.g. synonymy, polysemy) as well as to reduce the vector size in the IR tasks