Finding the right term: retrieving and exploring semantic concepts in astronomical vocabularies

Gray, A., Gray, N. , Hall, C. and Ounis, I. (2010) Finding the right term: retrieving and exploring semantic concepts in astronomical vocabularies. Information Processing and Management, 46(4), pp. 470-478. (doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2009.09.004)

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Publisher's URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2009.09.004

Abstract

Astronomy, like many domains, already has several sets of terminology in general use, referred to as controlled vocabularies. For example, the keywords for tagging journal articles, or the taxonomy of terms used to label image files. These existing vocabularies can be encoded into skos, a W3C proposed recommendation for representing vocabularies on the Semantic Web, so that computer systems can help users to search for and discover resources tagged with vocabulary concepts. However, this requires a search mechanism to go from a user-supplied string to a vocabulary concept. In this paper, we present our experiences in implementing the Vocabulary Explorer, a vocabulary search service based on the Terrier Information Retrieval Platform. We investigate the capabilities of existing document weighting models for identifying the correct vocabulary concept for a query. Due to the highly structured nature of a skos encoded vocabulary, we investigate the effects of term weighting (boosting the score of concepts that match on particular fields of a vocabulary concept), and query expansion. We found that the existing document weighting models provided very high quality results, but these could be improved further with the use of term weighting that makes use of the semantic evidence.

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Ounis, Professor Iadh and Gray, Dr Alasdair and Gray, Dr Norman
Authors: Gray, A., Gray, N., Hall, C., and Ounis, I.
Subjects:Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
College/School:College of Science and Engineering > School of Physics and Astronomy
Journal Name:Information Processing and Management
ISSN:0306-4573
ISSN (Online):1873-5371
Published Online:15 October 2009

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Project CodeAward NoProject NamePrincipal InvestigatorFunder's NameFunder RefLead Dept
433791Intelligent Access for Foreign Data ModelsIadh OunisEngineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)EP/E01142X/1Computing Science