Ontoogle: Enhancing retrieval with ontologies and facets

Design is a knowledge intensive activity, which depends on information to be undertaken. Previous designs, recent innovations, new techniques and materials must be taken into account when working on a new project, whatever its nature. Therefore, retrieving appropriate information is of paramount importance to the design process. Information retrieval is an established field, which has seen great progress in recent years. However, as the amount of unstructured information available increases, it becomes harder to retrieve the most relevant information using standard techniques and, frequently, users end up with results that don´t fulfill their information needs. In this paper, we present an approach to improve retrieval using query expansion through ontologies allied to faceted navigation. We constructed the Ontoogle tool, which uses an ontology describing a domain to expand the query and define result ranking and presentation using Faceted Navigation. This proposal was evaluated in a case study and the results indicate that this approach contributes to increased satisfaction and confidence of users during their search process.