Research on Ontology-Driven Information Retrieval

An increasing number of recent information retrieval systems make use of ontologies to help the users clarify their information needs and come up with semantic representations of documents A particular concern here is the integration of these semantic approaches with traditional search technology The research presented in this paper examines how ontologies can be efficiently applied to large-scale search systems for the web We describe how these systems can be enriched with adapted ontologies to provide both an in-depth understanding of the user's needs as well as an easy integration with standard vector-space retrieval systems The ontology concepts are adapted to the domain terminology by computing a feature vector for each concept Later, the feature vectors are used to enrich a provided query The whole retrieval system is under development as part of a larger Semantic Web standardization project for the Norwegian oil & gas sector.