Enabling Efficient Knowledge Reuse in the Semantic Web with SQORE

Existing approaches to ontology retrieval solely base on keyword matching and return a lengthy list of relevant ontologies which may not satisfy user requirements. Users, therefore, are not equipped with expressive means to structurally and semantically describe their ontology needs. To tackle this problem, this paper develops a framework for Semantic Query based Ontology Retrieval, namely SQORE. It enables precise formulation of a semantic query in order to best capture ontology requirements of the user, which includes not only the desired class and property names, but also their relations and restrictions. SQORE employs XML Declarative Description (XDD) theory as its theoretical foundation for modeling ontology databases and evaluating semantic queries. Moreover, similarity score, query coverage score and compactness score are formally defined as metrics for ranking the resultant ontologies. Experimental results indicate that SQORE yields better results and better rankings, when compared to existing systems.