Using an ontology to improve search in a terrorism database system

In this paper, we present our implementation of a Terrorism Database System and show how to leverage the expressive power of an ontology to improve search and document retrieval by extending the knowledge base of Oracle Text. We begin with a brief introduction to our Terrorism Database System, now in production. Then we describe the structure of the ontology, the interface for knowledge workers to add/edit/delete the content of the ontology, and the techniques for semi-automatic term generation as well as semantic content resolution when classifying documents.