Conceptual querying through ontologies

We present here an approach to conceptual querying where the aim is, given a collection of textual database objects or documents, to target an abstraction of the entire database content in terms of the concepts appearing in documents, rather than the documents in the collection. The approach is motivated by an obvious need for users to survey huge volumes of objects in query answers. An ontology formalism and a special notion of “instantiated ontology” are introduced. The latter is a structure reflecting the content in the document collection in that; it is a restriction of a general world knowledge ontology to the concepts instantiated in the collection. The notion of ontology-based similarity is briefly described, language constructs for direct navigation and retrieval of concepts in the ontology are discussed and approaches to conceptual summarization are presented.