The role of ontology in enhancing semantic searches: the EvOQS framework and its initial validation

Web search performance and efficiency is critical for many people and organizations in emerging knowledge society. Nowadays, ontologies are being applied in a number of ontology-based information retrieval systems in order to improve the performance of these systems wherein quality of ontology plays an important role. An important body of work exists in both information retrieval evaluation and ontology quality assessment areas. However, there is a lack of taskand scenario-based quality assessment methods. In this paper we discuss a framework to assess fitness of ontology for use in ontology-based search. We define metrics for ontology fitness to particular search tasks and metrics for ontology capability to enhance recall and precision. Further, we discuss preliminary results of an experiment showing applicability of the proposed framework and a value of ontology quality in ontology-driven Web search.