Ontology-driven Semantic Keyword Search For Heterogeneous Data Sources

Massive heterogeneous XML data sources emerge on the internet nowadays. These data sources are generally autonomous and provide search interfaces of XML query language such as XPath or XQuery.Accordingly,users need to learn complex syntaxes and know the schemas to access them.Keyword Search is a user-friendly information discovery technique,which can help novice users obtain useful information conveniently,however the search semantics turns to be vague.We propose a system SOAK which can provide a common keyword interface for heterogeneous XML data sources.SOAK employs OWL Ontology[18]to represent semantics of XML data,for Ontology is an explicit specification of a shared conceptualization which can express rich semantics.Consequently,SOAK can convey sufficient semantical information through it.There are mainly three advantages of this system:(1) SOAK can distill semantical information from keywords;(2) implicit semantics could be revealed through ontology integration;(3) results are exhibited as the formation of ontology,therefore users can obtain intuitional information conveniently.