Formal Ontology Model and its Application to Semantic Retrieval

Current information retrieval techniques either rely on an encoding process to describe a given item or perform a full-text analysis to search for user-specified words. Because an encoded description might reflect only part of the content, they can´t guarantee content matching. Ontology is an explicit specification of conceptualizations, which can explicitly and formally express the semantic of the concepts and their relationship. So ontology is better for information retrieval in semantic level. This paper introduces the basic concept of ontology, and presents a formal ontological model using description logic. Then, an algorithm for checking subsumption relation between terms is given. At last, request mode and response mode are modeled. Based on the two modes, a new semantic-enabling information retrieval mechanism is discussed.