A Review of Ontology-based Information Retrieval Techniques on Generic Domains

Abstract

A promising evolution of the existing web where machine and people are in cooperation is the Semantic Web. That is, a machine’s represented and understandable web. This is against the existing web which is syntactic in nature - where meaning of query search and its expected results on the web is mostly understood and interpreted by user not machine. However, the technologies drive behind this goal of semantic web is on one hand ontologies and on the other hand information retrieval techniques. Ontology is a data modeling technique for structured data repository premised on collection of concepts with their semantic relationships and constraints on a chosen area of knowledge. While on the other hand information retrieval technique is a mechanism of retrieving relevant information based on the query search. There are existing techniques for information retrieval processes, which includes that of ontological process. Therefore, this paper aimed to present a review on these existing techniques based on different classifications processes. Also, the analysis and comparison of the review are carried out based on some fundamental criteria which include various ontology’s domains, ontological tools, information retrieval techniques along with the weights computation algorithms and different evaluation techniques. Thus, a review of ontology based information retrieval techniques had been carried out and this paper has disambiguates the categorization processes of the techniques and serves as a developer’s guide for chosen a technique for any domain.