Development of Faceted and Synonym Search Support for the Ontology Application Management Framework

Semantic search is a form of search that goes beyond keyword-based searching. Searching based on keywords typically has several disadvantages including homonym and synonym problems which can reduce the retrieval effectiveness of a search system. Ontology-based search is a form of semantic search that can be applied to searching structured data, i.e. RDF data, which are exported from relational database. The Ontology Application Management (OAM) framework can provide support for ontology-based search application development over RDF data using an application template that generates queries based on SPARQL template. However, OAM still relies on keywordbased search when the properties are datatype properties, i.e. those having property values as literals. In this paper, we propose to use faceted and synonym search to augment the keyword-based search over datatype property values. One of the main goals is to provide a generic framework for improving the effectiveness of searching RDF data. Our system design adopted the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach in creating reusable service components. Two key components are synonym and aggregation service Web APIs. The SPARQL query templates for implementing synonym and faceted search are described. Finally, we demonstrate an adoption of the framework in searching a large-scale database in the professional qualification domain.