Evaluating Ontology Search

As more and more ontologies are being published on the Semantic Web, selecting the most appropriate ontology will become an increasingly important subtask in Semantic Web applications. Here we present an approach towards ontology search in the context of OntoSelect, a dynamic web-based ontology library. In OntoSelect, ontologies can be searched by keyword or by document. In keyword-based search only the keyword(s) provided by the user will be used for the search. In document-based search the user can provide either a URL for a web document that represents a specific topic or the user simply provides a keyword as the topic which is then automatically linked to a corresponding Wikipedia page from which a linguistically/statistically derived set of most relevant keywords will be extracted and used for the search. In this paper we describe an experiment in evaluating the document-based ontology search strategy based on an evaluation data set that we constructed specifically for this task.