Practical Experiences in Building Ontology-based Retrieval Systems

This paper describes practical experiences and lessons learned in the project “A Semantic Web for Pathology”, a project using domain ontologies and ontology-driven natural language processing to support a content-based retrieval of text and image-based medical information. In trying to develop the target application ontology we investigated the potential of reusing the huge amount of domain knowledge already available in ontology-like form in the medical domain as an input for the domain conceptualization. According to our experiences we confirm previous findings in the knowledge acquisition literature and in recent surveys of the state of the art in the ontology engineering area: 1). building ontology-based applications is still a tedious process mainly because of the lack of mature tools and methods, which can handle the requirements of real-world applications; and 2). using existing ontologies in new application contexts is currently related to considerable efforts, which might outweigh the benefits of the reuse process. We use the insights gained during this project to derive a set of guidelines for developing Semantic Web retrieval applications in similar domains.