Searching the news Using a rich ontology with time-bound roles to search through annotated newspaper archives

A frequent motivation for annotating documents using ontologies is to allow more efficient search. For collections of newspaper articles, it is often difficult to find specific articles based on keywords or topics alone. This paper describes a system that uses a formalisation of the content of newspaper articles to answer complex queries. The data for this system is created using Relational Content Analysis, a method used in Communication Sciences in which documents are annotated using a rich annotation scheme based on an ontology that includes political roles with temporal validity. Using custom inferencing over the temporal relations and query translation, our system can be used to search for and browse through newspaper articles and to perform systematic analyses by evaluating queries against all articles in the corpus. This makes the system useful both for the (Social) Scientist and for interested laypersons.