Ontology-driven query expansion methods to facilitate federated queries

In view of the need for a highly distributed and federated architecture, a robust query expansion in a specific domain has great impact on the performance of information retrieval. We aim to determine robust expansion terms using different weighting techniques and finding out the most k-top relevant terms. For this, first, we consider each individual ontology and user query keywords to determine the Basic Expansion Terms (BET) using a number of semantic measures namely Density Measure (DM), Betweenness Measure (BM), and Semantic Similarity Measure (SSM). Second, we specify New Expansion Terms (NET) by Ontology Alignment (OA). Third, we weight expanded terms using a combination of these semantic measures. Fourth, we use a Specific Interval(SI) to determine a set of Robust Expansion Terms (RET). Finally, we compare the result of our novel weighting approach with existing expansion approaches and show the effectiveness of our robust expansion in federated architecture.