Approach for defining relevance in the ontology-based information retrieval

One of the vital problems in the searching for information is the ranking of the retrieved results, because users make typically very short queries (2-3 terms) and tend to consider only the first ten results. In traditional IR approaches the relevance of the results is determined only by analysing the underlying information repository (content and hyperlink structure), which leads to the weak relevance model. On the other hand, in the ontology-based IR the querying process is supported by an ontology such that other important sources for determining the relevance of results can be considered: the structure of the underlying domain and the characteristics of the searching process. In this paper we present a novel approach for determining relevance in ontology-based searching for information, which exploits the "full potential" of the semantics of such a semantically-based link structure.