SBIR Phase I: Customized Ontology Information Retrieval

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I research project will develop and demonstrate a prototype information retrieval application that creates a customized view of a domain ontology to assist users in retrieving relevant documents from a collection of information. The ontology will be employed to guide users to optimize their query formation; the system will capture and analyze the user's query development process and term preferences in order to identify term usage patterns. The system will also analyze the choices the user makes to view documents from the search results. The results of the user query analysis and document selection analysis will be used to create a user-specific unique view of the ontology for future searches. This capability will dramatically improve the accuracy, speed, and "intelligence" of context-aware information retrieval systems. It will also enable refinement of the ontology for greater semantic depth and utility. This development will have broad impacts for the information management community. By increasing the depth of semantic understanding through interaction with users, the system will "mine" the expertise of its users to enrich the source ontologies, increasing their usefulness for a broader base of users. The customizable ontology capability developed under this project will find uses in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, defense/counterterrorism, and manufacturing at a minimum - in every sector reliant on "deep knowledge." Customizable ontologies will reduce the volume and diversity of information presented to users, improving retrieval accuracy and speed by orders of magnitude and enabling future search engines to deliver - with a single "hit" - exactly the information sought. By enabling clearer articulation of user needs based on term usage and preferences, this project is expected to improve information retrieval system efficiency tenfold. The customizable ontology will provide a pathway to dynamic, real-time knowledge management. As just one example, ontology-based advisors offer tremendous opportunities for innovation in product and process development, by enabling designers to draw effectively on the captured knowledge of the enterprise.