BookOnt: A Comprehensive Book Structural Ontology for Book Search and Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) methods are being applied in searching relevant books and their parts in a large book collection. These methods treat books as plaintext and apply traditional bags-of-words models, which ignore the structural semantics as well as logical connections in structure and content of books. In order to enable machines to understand and exploit these semantics and logical connections for book search and retrieval, book structure ontologies are required. Several ontologies have been devised to describe the structure of the books and in establishing logical connections in their content. However, these ontologies are not comprehensive enough to fully describe book structure. To handle this issue, we present BookOnt, a comprehensive book structure ontology. Results show that BookOnt can better serve the needs of book search and retrieval.