Falcons Concept Search: A Practical Search Engine for Web Ontologies
Yuzhong Qu, Gong Cheng · IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics - Part A Systems and Humans · 2011
Web ontologies provide shared concepts for describing domain entities and thus enable semantic interoperability between applications. To facilitate concept sharing and ontology reusing, we developed Falcons Concept Search, a novel keyword-based ontology search engine. In this paper, we illustrate how the proposed mode of interaction helps users quickly find ontologies that satisfy their needs and present several supportive techniques including a new method of constructing virtual documents of concepts for keyword search, a popularity-based scheme to rank concepts and ontologies, and a way to generate query-relevant structured snippets. We also report the results of a usability evaluation as well as user feedback.