Ontology-based discovery of information — An application in directory service system of Yellow River data resources

At present, there are vast amounts of information and applications available in distributed environment with heterogeneous databases, how to find them is a crucial task. An ontology-driven approach is put forward to overcome semantic heterogeneity caused by synonyms and homonyms during keyword-based search in catalogues. An ontology has a key role to play in the development of a spatially aware search engine, with regard to providing support for query disambiguation, query term expansion, relevance ranking and information resource annotation. This paper presents a practical case study to what extent ontology-based information discovery can solve semantic heterogeneity problems. The ontology is divided into information ontology and domain ontology in order to realize the objective of semantic match for information search. The architecture, the functions and the implementation of the system are described in details. However, the approach reveals some limitations in the context of information discovery, which are discussed in the end.