Falcons Concept Search: A Practical Search Engine for Web Ontologies

Web ontologies provide shared concepts for describing domain entities and thus enable semantic interoperability between applications. To facilitate concept sharing and ontology reusing, we developed Falcons Concept Search, a novel keyword-based ontology search engine. In this paper, we illustrate how the proposed mode of interaction helps users quickly find ontologies that satisfy their needs and present several supportive techniques including a new method of constructing virtual documents of concepts for keyword search, a popularity-based scheme to rank concepts and ontologies, and a way to generate query-relevant structured snippets. We also report the results of a usability evaluation as well as user feedback.