An ontology based-approach for semantic search in portals

Portals have become very popular on the Internet. They allow users to access many online transactions and customized information. More recently, semantic portals emerged as a natural extension of traditional portals and they have been attracting researchers and enterprise attention as a new way to provide information. This paper covers these issues and shows how ontologies can improve results relevance in one of the most important component of a portal: the search mechanism. It describes a search tool developed in the context of a semantic portal named PASS (portal with access to semantic search). this tool uses components of domain ontologies stored in the portal to expand terms during the search process.