• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.129-143
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• 2012

Recently, the rapid progress of a number of standardized web technologies and the proliferation of web users in the world bring an explosive increase of producing and consuming information documents on the web. In addition, most companies have produced, shared, and managed a huge number of information documents that are needed to perform their businesses. They also have discretionally raked, stored and managed a number of web documents published on the web for their business. Along with this increase of information documents that should be managed in the companies, the need of a solution to locate information documents more accurately among a huge number of information sources have increased. In order to satisfy the need of accurate search, the market size of search engine solution market is becoming increasingly expended. The most important functionality among much functionality provided by search engine is to locate accurate information documents from a huge information sources. The major metric to evaluate the accuracy of search engine is relevance that consists of two measures, precision and recall. Precision is thought of as a measure of exactness, that is, what percentage of information considered as true answer are actually such, whereas recall is a measure of completeness, that is, what percentage of true answer are retrieved as such. These two measures can be used differently according to the applied domain. If we need to exhaustively search information such as patent documents and research papers, it is better to increase the recall. On the other hand, when the amount of information is small scale, it is better to increase precision. Most of existing web search engines typically uses a keyword search method that returns web documents including keywords which correspond to search words entered by a user. This method has a virtue of locating all web documents quickly, even though many search words are inputted. However, this method has a fundamental imitation of not considering search intention of a user, thereby retrieving irrelevant results as well as relevant ones. Thus, it takes additional time and effort to set relevant ones out from all results returned by a search engine. That is, keyword search method can increase recall, while it is difficult to locate web documents which a user actually want to find because it does not provide a means of understanding the intention of a user and reflecting it to a progress of searching information. Thus, this research suggests a new method of combining ontology-based search solution with core search functionalities provided by existing search engine solutions. The method enables a search engine to provide optimal search results by inferenceing the search intention of a user. To that end, we build an ontology which contains concepts and relationships among them in a specific domain. The ontology is used to inference synonyms of a set of search keywords inputted by a user, thereby making the search intention of the user reflected into the progress of searching information more actively compared to existing search engines. Based on the proposed method we implement a prototype search system and test the system in the patent domain where we experiment on searching relevant documents associated with a patent. The experiment shows that our system increases the both recall and precision in accuracy and augments the search productivity by using improved user interface that enables a user to interact with our search system effectively. In the future research, we will study a means of validating the better performance of our prototype system by comparing other search engine solution and will extend the applied domain into other domains for searching information such as portal.