Effective ranking and search techniques for Web resources considering semantic relationships

On the Semantic Web, the types of resources and the semantic relationships between resources are defined in an ontology. By using that information, the accuracy of information retrieval can be improved. In this paper, we present effective ranking and search techniques considering the semantic relationships in an ontology. Our technique retrieves top-k resources which are the most relevant to query keywords through the semantic relationships. To do this, we propose a weighting measure for the semantic relationship. Based on this measure, we propose a novel ranking method which considers the number of meaningful semantic relationships between a resource and keywords as well as the coverage and discriminating power of keywords. In order to improve the efficiency of the search, we prune the unnecessary search space using the length and weight thresholds of the semantic relationship path. In addition, we exploit Threshold Algorithm based on an extended inverted index to answer top-k results efficiently. The experimental results using real data sets demonstrate that our retrieval method using the semantic information generates accurate results efficiently compared to the traditional methods. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.