Semantic Annotation for Supporting Context-Aware Information Retrieval in the Transportation Project Environmental Review Domain

Abstract

AbstractAlthough transportation practitioners nowadays have an unprecedented level of access to information, substantial gaps still exist in their ability to efficiently and reliably find the right information, at the right time, for the task or decision at hand. To address this gap, this paper proposes a context-aware information retrieval (IR) approach that can capture and exploit the conceptualization of user needs, decision context, and content meanings in order to support the retrieval of information that is more relevant to decision making. The proposed IR approach includes three primary components: semantic annotation (SA), semantic query processing (SQP), and semantic document ranking (SDR). This paper focuses on SA for IR for supporting the transportation project environmental review (TPER) decision-making process. It proposes an epistemology-based SA algorithm for automatically annotating Web pages in the TPER domain with contextual concepts from an epistemological model. The TPER epistemology i...