Representing User Information Context with Ontologies
Ahu Sieg, Bamshad Mobasher, Robin Burke, G. Karthick Prabu, Steve Lytinen · 2005
One of the key factors for accurate and effective information access is the user context. The critical elements that make up a user's information context include the semantic knowledge about the domain being investigated, the short-term information need as might be expressed in a query, and the user profiles that reveal long-term interests. In this paper, we propose a framework for contextualized information access that seamlessly combines these elements in order to effectively locate and provide the most appropriate result for users' information needs. In particular, we focus on integrating a user's query with semantic knowledge from an existing concept hierarchy to assist the user in information retrieval. In our framework, the user’s “context” is captured via nodes in a concept lattice induced from the original ontology and is updated incrementally based on user's interactions with the concepts in the ontology. Our experimental results show that utilizing the user context improves the effectiveness of the search queries, especially in the typical case of Web users who tend to use very short queries.