Summarizations for Annotated Objects Using Semantic Similarity and Specificity

The QUOTA (querying with ontological terminologies and their annotations) system is being developed so that a user may query, summarize, and filter information on objects that are annotated using a vocabulary from a terminology structured as an ontology. QUOTA integrates a variety of functionality for analyzing and comparing annotated objects into one software tool and extends and enriches this functionality by examining how similarity measures and user preference selection for coverage and specificity affect the returned results. QUOTA is being developed so that it is applicable to all domains having an ontology of annotating terms and files or databases of annotated objects. The focus in this paper is the summarization query that allows a user to enter a set of annotated objects and produces a ranked list of terms taken from the ontology. This ranked list of terms is a representative description of the set of annotated objects.