QUEXME: A Query Expansion Method Applied to Water Information System

The aim of the paper is to present and apply a QUery EXpansion MEthod called QUEXME while querying the Euro-Mediterranean Information System (EMWIS) on know-how in the Water sector. EMWIS provides a strategic tool for exchanging information and knowledge in the water sector between and within the Euro Mediterranean partnership countries (www.emwis.net). Information retrieval on the web or through some cooperation of information sources or some general knowledge bases is a complex process and a great challenge with the emergence of the semantic web. The aim of the query expansion method is to help and guide users to build their requests giving them some usually related terms close to their queries. Information retrieval in EMWIS is based on the use of a thesaurus to query the information system and to find relevant documents on some specific topics in the water sector. This thesaurus can be viewed as a light-weight web ontology. It is multilingual. This paper proposes an experimentation of our query expansion method within the framework of the EMWIS information system.