Enriching Concept Search across Semantic Web Ontologies

Semantic Web ontologies are fast-growing knowledge sources on the Web. Searching relevant concepts from this large repository is a challenging problem. The current Semantic Web search engines provide either (1) coarse-grained search over ontologies or (2) very fine-grained search over individuals.We believe searching and ranking concepts across ontologies provides an ideal granularity for certain tasks such as ontology population and web page annotation. Towards this objective, we propose a novel approach of indexing concepts using ontology axioms in an inverted file structure and ranking them using a dynamic ranking algorithm. Our proposed method is generic and domain-independent. A preliminary evaluation indicates that our proposed method is effective, outperforming the search function of BioPortal, a large and widely-used ontology repository.