Domain knowledge based information retrieval language: an application of annotated Bayesian networks in ovarian cancer domain

The increasing amount and variety of domain knowledge and the availability of increasingly large quantities of electronic literature requires new types of support for the development of complex knowledge models. P. Antal et al. (2001) proposed the application of so-called annotated Bayesian networks (ABNs), which are textually-enriched probabilistic domain models that help knowledge engineers and medical experts to find and organize the information that is necessary in model-building. In this paper, we describe an information retrieval language in which the formalized domain knowledge and the attached textual information can be accessed in an integrated fashion and can be used to define various retrieval schemes and relevance measures. This language on the one hand provides maximum flexibility for knowledge engineers to exploit the available annotated domain model as contextual information. On the other hand, it allows the definition of complex, high-level queries, in which the contextual use of the annotated domain model can be optimized for clinical situations. We compare the performance of the standard and the proposed query language in the ovarian cancer domain.