OntoSeek: Using Large Linguistic Ontologies for Accessing On-Line Yellow Pages and Product Catalogs

Research Positions: Statements (No Presentations, Unrefereed)

To exploit effectively the mass of information available today on the Web, the key problem is that of content matching: the relevant information must be selected according to the user needs, independently of the vocabulary and the syntax used to express it. Content matching seems to be an intrinsic problem for textual documents or web pages: current information retrieval techniques either rely on an encoding process that describes a given item according to a certain perspective or classification scheme, or perform a full-text analysis based on the search for userspecified words. Neither case guarantees content matching, because an encoded description may reflect only part of the content, and the mere occurrence of a word (or even sentence) does not necessarily reflect the document’s content.