Applying Collective Intelligence for Search Improvement on Thai Herbal Information

Knowledge about herbal medicine can be contributed from experts in several cultures. With the conventional techniques, it is hard to find the way which the experts can build a self-sustainable community for exchanging their information. In this paper, the Knowledge Unifying Initiator for Herbal Information (KUIHerb) is used as a platform for building a web community for collecting the intercultural herbal knowledge with the concept of a collective intelligence. With this system, herb identification, herbal vocabulary and medicinal usages can be collected from this system. KUIHerb provides herbal vocabulary which is dynamically and confidentially applied for searching improvement on the Thai herbal search engine. Three strategies are utilized: (1) providing a set of technical terms in Thai with can be added into the dictionary. These terms are utilized by Thai word segmentation for improving the indexing process (2) A set of synonyms of these technical terms in both Thai and English is built for helping users from a lot of keywords of the same term and (3) a set of keywords from herbal usages can be combined with the name keyword. From the results, information collected from KUIHerb is useful for searching.