CONTEXTUAL SEMANTIC SEARCH - Capturing and using the User’s Context to Direct Semantic Search

Abstract

One orthodox perspective of the semantic Web depends on establishing a unified representation of ontology for an universe of discourse. However this expectation is unrealistic, because different people have different views of the world, making it impossible to devise a unified knowledge view that satisfies everyone in certain cases. One solution for this problem is to allow different users' views of consensual knowledge formalized in an ontology, and keep track of the mappings between these views and the underlying ontology. This work proposes to collect context information from the users interactions with a semantic search system, in order to gradually build individual users' views mapped to an ontology. This approach allows the user to pose queries based on keywords or his personal knowledge view. In addition, each personalized knowledge view captures the preferences of a single, specific user, enabling the system to provide better search results, based on its previous experience with that user.