Construction of the structural definition-based terminology ontology system and semantic search evaluation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to construct a structural definition-based terminology ontology system that defines the meanings of academic terms on the basis of properties and links terms with properties that are structured by conceptual categories (classes). This study also aims to test the possibility of semantic searches by generating inference rules and setting very complicated search scenarios. Design/methodology/approach For the study, 55,236 keywords from the articles of the “Korea Citation Index” were structurally defined and relationships among terms and properties were built. Then, the authors converted the RDB data into RDF and designed ontologies using the ontology developing tool Protege. The authors also tested the designed ontology with the inference engine of the Protege editor. The generated reference rules were tested by TBox and SPARQL queries. Findings The authors generated inference control rules targeting high-input-ratio data in the properties of classes by calculating the input ratio of real input data in the system, and then the authors executed a semantic search by SPARQL query by setting very complicated search scenarios, for which it would be difficult to deduce results via a simple keyword search. As a result, it was confirmed that the search results show the logical combination of semantically related term data. Practical implications The proposed terminology ontology system was constructed with the author keywords from research papers, it will be useful in searching the research papers which include the keywords as search results by the complex combination of semantic relation. And the Structural Terminology Net database could be utilized as an index database in retrieval services and the mining of informal big data through the application of well-defined semantic concepts to each term. Originality/value This paper presented a methodology for supporting IR using expanded queries based on a novel model of structural terminology-based ontology. The user who wants to access the specific topic can create query that brings the semantically relevant information. The search results show the logical combination of semantically related term data, which would be difficult to deduce results via traditional IR systems.