ONTOWEB: Implementing an Ontology-Based Web Retrieval System

The design and implementation of an ontology-based Web retrieval (ONTOWEB) system is described; ONTOWEB allows the semantic search of the Web resources of international organizations such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A firm’s knowledge management project is introduced first, followed by a description of the ONTOWEB system’s design, implementation, and evaluation. The ONTOWEB system has two components: databases and an ontology-based search engine. The ontology-based search engine is a tool used to query the information that has been loaded into the database. Last, to evaluate the system, an experiment was conducted to compare the performance of the proposed system with that of Internet search engines in terms of relevance and search time. This study shows that ontologies can be used not only to improve precision, but also to reduce the search time. Because of the expense of annotating resources, the domains that contain the most valuable knowledge, such as the medical and the business sectors, are prime areas for future ontology applications