A Clustering Based Indexing Technique of Modularized Ontologies for Information Retrieval

Abstract

Indexing plays a vital role in Information Retrieval. With the availability of huge volume of information, it has become necessary to index the information in such a way to make easier for the end users to nd the information they want e - ciently and accurately. Keyword-based indexing uses words as indexing terms. It is not capable of capturing the implicit relation among terms or the semantics of the words in the document. To eliminate this limitation, ontology-based indexing came into existence, which allows semantic based indexing to solve complex and indirect user queries. Ontologies are used for document indexing which allows semantic based information retrieval. Existing ontologies or the ones constructed from scratch are used presently for indexing. Constructing ontologies from scratch is a labor-intensive task and requires extensive domain knowledge whereas use of an existing ontology may leave some important concepts in documents un-annotated. Using multiple ontologies can overcome the problem of missing out concepts to a great extent, but it is di cult to manage (changes in ontologies over time by their developers) multiple ontologies and ontology heterogeneity also arises due to ontologies constructed by di erent ontology developers. One possible solution to managing multiple ontologies and build from scratch is to use modular ontologies for indexing. Modular ontologies are built in modular manner by combining modules from multiple relevant ontologies. Ontology heterogeneity also arises during modular ontology construction because multiple ontologies are being dealt with, during this process. Ontologies need to be aligned before using them for modular ontology construction. The existing approaches for ontology alignment compare all the concepts of each ontology to be aligned, hence not optimized in terms of time and search space utilization. A new indexing technique is proposed based on modular ontology. An e cient ontology alignment technique is proposed to solve the heterogeneity problem during the construction of modular ontology. Results are satisfactory as Precision and Recall are improved by (8%) and (10%) respectively. The value of Pearsons Correlation Coe cient for degree of similarity, time, search space requirement, precision and recall are close to 1 which shows that the results are signi cant. Further research can be carried out for using modular ontology based indexing technique for Multimedia Information Retrieval and Bio-Medical information retrieval.