Using relationships between ontologies to enhance the ontology search

Using semantic web search engines, such as Watson, Swoogle or Sindice, to find ontologies is a complex exploratory activity. It generally requires formulating multiple queries, browsing pages of results, and assessing the returned ontologies against each other to obtain a relevant and adequate subset of ontologies for the intended use. Our hypothesis is that at least some of the difficulties related to searching ontologies stem from the lack of structure in the search results, where ontologies that are implicitly related to each other are presented as disconnected and shown on different result pages. In earlier publications we presented a software framework, Kannel, which is able to automatically detect and make explicit relationships between ontologies in large ontology repositories. In this paper, we present a study that compares the use of the Watson ontology search engine with an extension, Watson+Kannel, which provides information regarding the various relationships occurring between the result ontologies. We evaluate Watson+Kannel by demonstrating through various indicators that explicit relationships between ontologies improve users’ efficiency in ontology search, thus validating our hypothesis.