Ontology and Information Retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) field still requires research in order to create models capable of providing answers more precisely. Trying to enhance IR systems, several researchers have been using ontologies due to its capacity to be “understood” by computer systems (definition about ontology can be read in my previous post). There are some systems available but we still do not have the killer application.
Using an ontology means to narrow the scope of research to a specific domain, i.e., an ontology represents the knowledge about a domain. It corresponds to the vision of computer science community. However, philosophers believe that there is only one ontology that should describe the only one possible reality. This philosophical view, in my opinion, seems to be impractical, at least in my area.
How to define and represent the only possible reality? If we think about a simple domain, clearly we can see that (domain) specialists may have different opinions about concepts and how to transcribe them into an ontology – imagine to create an ontology to represent all domains. But if we do not develop practical applications and build our ontologies, we will discuss it forever and will not be able to verify whether ontologies can be useful or not – for practical purpose.
Again, we still do not have the killer application in IR using ontologies, but at least there are many researchers working on it – developing practical IR systems. Many papers describe the (great) importance of inserting ontology technology to enhance IR systems. All works I have read report advantages in using ontologies over the classical approaches – including my current work (to be available soon). Imagine how many people could take advantage of that if we have this kind of application available for any domain!? Let’s keep working…
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