Ontology-Driven Visualization System for Semantic Search

Technical manuals are very diverse, ranging from manuals on software to manuals on commodities, general instructions and technical manuals that deal with specific domains such as mechanical maintenance. Due to the vast amount of manual information finding the necessary information is quite difficult. In case of electronic maintenance manuals currently used by companies, mechanics should search for the related information to accomplish their tasks. And it is difficult to grasp relationships among contents in manuals. Search process is time-consuming and laborious for mechanics. Many researchers have adopted ontology to solve these problems and semantically represent contents of manuals. However if ontology becomes very large and complex, it is not easy to work with ontology. Visualization has been an effective way to grasp and manipulate ontology. In this research, we model new ontology to represent and retrieve contents of manuals and design the visualization system based on proposed ontology. To model ontology, we analyzed aircraft maintenance process, extracted concepts and defined relationships between concepts. After modeling, we created instances of each class using technical manuals. Our system visualizes related information so that mechanics can intuitively grasp the information. This allows workers to easily get information for given tasks and to reduce their time to search related information. Also, related information can be understood at a time through visualization.