Visual Ontology-Based Information Retrieval System

The semantic Web has been evolved as a key technology, bringing new insights and solutions to well documented problems in e-learning. The research field of semantic e-learning covers a wide range of research problems. In this paper, we present an approach to visualize an ontology driven information retrieval system in the context of E-learning. This approach has been implemented on the HyperManyMedia platform, and is already being used by online students at WKU. The design of this work is based on the following steps: (1) presenting the HyperManyMedia domain as a tree consisting of concepts and subconcepts where the leaves are the documents (lectures), (2) embedding Nutch search engine into the platform, (3) reconfiguring Nutch search engine to accommodate the semantic search, (4) using Prefuse as a visual tool to present the ontology as a graph, and (5) embedding the graph into the platform as an applet so that learners can navigate visually through the ontology of the domain by clicking on nodes.