Applying Language Technology to Ontology-Based Querying: The Ontoquery Project

This paper addresses the issue of how language technology resources and components can be applied in ontology-based querying. In particular, it presents the approach to text and query analysis adopted in the Danish research project OntoQuery, where shallow syntactic analysis and ontology-based parsing are combined in order to identify nominal phrases (NPs) and assign them a semantic description. Semantic descriptions are used by the search engine to match queries against texts in a database, and a ranking of the texts retrieved is produced based on a domain ontology. This is intended to be a general methodology applicable to texts from different domains, including those relevant to cultural heritage, although OntoQuery has chosen nutrition as its first target domain. The paper focuses on the language technology aspects of the methodology, the ontology-based lexicon inherited from the SIMPLE project, and the development of the domain-specific ontology. The methodology is partly implemented in a prototype.