Design and implementation of a prototype Ontology Aided Knowledge Discovery Assistant (OAKDA) application

摘要

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become a major source of easily accessible information for students, professionals, researchers and the general public. However, the volume of information available through the Web is so overwhelming that it is not unusual to get tens of thousands of "hits" when conducting a relatively simple search. Most existing search techniques use brute force based on keyword matches to find related Web pages. While the enormous speed of search engines improves the efficiency of such methods, effectiveness is not improved. The objective of this thesis is to construct and test an ontology-based application to help users identify the most pertinent keywords for a search. By navigating ontologies that describe domains of interest, users are assisted in finding a relevant set of key terms that will aid the search enginees in narrowing, widening or refocusing a Web search. Specifically, the thesis develops an ontology-aided Web search assistant prototype to help users enhance the relevance and precision of the returned results through the use of a context provided by ontologies associated with each search.