Searching with an Integrated Ontology

Floor Verdenius, Jan Top, Nicole Ketelaars

ATO B.V.P.O. Box 17

6700 AA WageningenThe Netherlands

F.Verdenius@ato.wag-ur.nl

Content

• Introduction• Principles• Examples• Realisation

Introduction

Goal of the pilotIllustrating the power of an Agricultural Ontology Server in identifying

relevant information

Objectives• Easy to realize pilot

• Using real world cases

• Providing actual illustration of the concept

Introduction

Benefits• Illustration of AOS potential

• Preparation of full AOS proposal• Improved search quality in A/OL

• Search service for Combase domain

Technology• Ontologies are developed in Protégé

• The AOS pilot is a prototype web application• The AOS pilot calls an external search engine

Introduction

Results

• Dedicated domain ontology for Combase,• Common A/OL-Combase ontology consisting of the shared concepts• Demonstration of improved search capacity for at least 3 queries; for each

query:- search without an ontology- search with A/OL ontology- search with integrated AOS ontology (A/OL & Combase) - search both deep and wide in the ontologies

Principles

• Domain ontologies:– A/OL: Structured knowledge on Anti-microbial Compounds– Combase: Structured knowledge on Microbial Growth

A/OL ontology• Anti-microbial compounds• Food substrates• Experiments• Measurements• Micro-organisms (list)

Combase ontology• Microbial growth• Biochemistry• Micro-organisms (taxonomy)

Cross-domain ontologyReconciled & unified concepts (e.g. micro-organisms)

Searching using an ontologySearching is more efficient, because concepts have

a meaning and a relation with respect to other concepts.

Example: beer• lager, stout and ale are types of beer (child of)• beer is an alcoholic beverage, like wine (type of)

deep search wide search

Realization

• A/OL OntologyFormulating the ontology for Anti-microbial compounds(part of the A/OL project)

• Combase ontologyFormulating the ontology for Microbial GrowthFormalizing knowledge that fills the Combase simulation system

• Mapping A/OL & Combase ontologyIdentification of shared concepts in ontologiesReformulating ontologies based on cross domain ontology

• Search demonstrationDemonstration of search performances on 3 representative search queries