Ontology-Aided vs. Keyword-Based Web Searches: A Comparative User Study

摘要

Ontologies are formal explicit description of concepts in a domain of discourse, properties of these concepts, andrestrictions on these properties that are specified by semantics that follow the “rules” of the domain ofknowledge. As such, ontologies would be extremely useful as knowledge bases for an application attempting toadd context to a particular Web search term. This paper describes such an application and reports the results of auser study designed to compare the effectiveness of the results of web search queries formulated using anontology -aided application with those obtained using only a keyword-based search engine. The results of thestudy demonstrate that an ontology -aided search application does indeed increase the effectiveness of websearches for those searches requiring a deep domain knowledge.