Information inquiry for research institutions: A semantic web based approach

Conventionally, when the administration needs to learn the work of its research institutions, the most popular form is handing out various survey reports. Due to the difference in the platforms and vocabularies used by research institutions and their administrations, it is hard to completely automate this task and thus it takes a lot of time for the institutions to manually fill out these reports. To fill this gap, this paper employs the semantic web technologies to develop an information inquiry system for research institutions. First, we extract and preprocess the entity information from the institutions. Then we use the ontology language to describe the logical relations between entities like organizations, people and projects. Thus an institution-oriented functional ontology is constructed, which is capable of logical reasoning. Next, with self-defined rules, we also incorporate the generic rule engine to realize the functionality of information retrieval. Finally, by treating this system as the service provider in the architecture of the semantic web services, we fulfill the separation of query content from query format and enable the interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Therefore, both the administrations and the institutions can use their own language to pose or process the query. Such a system not only demonstrates the power of semantic web, but also provides a portal for the exchange and sharing of information between research institutions and their administrations.