The role of ontology in enhancing semantic searches: the EvOQS framework and its initial validation

Abstract

Web search performance and efficiency are critical for many people and organisations in the emerging knowledge society. Nowadays, ontologies are being applied in a number of ontology-based information retrieval systems in order to improve the performance of these systems, wherein the quality of the ontology plays an important role. An important body of work exists in the areas of both information retrieval evaluation and ontology quality assessment. However, there is a lack of task- and scenario-based quality assessment methods. In this paper we discuss a framework to assess the fitness of the ontology for use in an ontology-based search. We define metrics for the ontology fitness to particular search tasks and metrics for the ontology capability to enhance recall and precision. Further, we discuss the preliminary results of an experiment showing the applicability of the proposed framework and the value of the ontology quality in ontology-driven web searches.