OntoSearch: An Ontology Search Engine 1

Yi Zhang, Wamberto Vasconcelos, Derek Sleeman

Department of Computing Science,
University of Aberdeen,
Aberdeen, AB24 3UE, Scotland, UK
Email: {yzhang, wvasconc, dsleeman}@ csd.abdn.ac.uk

Abstract

Reuse of knowledge bases and the semantic web are two promising areas in
knowledge technologies. Given some user requirements, finding the suitable
ontologies is an important task in both these areas. This paper discusses our
work on OntoSearch, a kind of "ontology Google", which can help users find
ontologies on the Internet. OntoSearch combines Google Web APIs with a
hierarchy visualization technique. It allows the user to perform keyword
searches on certain types of “ontology” files, and to visually inspect the files
to check their relevance. OntoSearch system is based on Java, JSP, Jena and
JBoss technologies.

1. Introduction
Reuse of knowledge bases 2 is an important area in knowledge technologies.
Determining the principal topic of an existing knowledge base (KB) is very
important for the reuse of knowledge bases. Identify-Knowledge-Base (IKB) [2, 3]
is a tool to identify the principal topic(s) of some particular knowledge base by
matching concepts (extracted from the KB) against a reference taxonomy
(extracted from a reference ontology). Finding (normally from the Internet) a
relevant reference ontology for a particular KB is the key point in the use of the
IKB system.

1
This work is part of the Advanced Knowledge Technology (AKT) project, which
is funded by EPSRC, [1]. The IKB system [2, 3](Aberdeen University) and the
ExtrAKT system [4, 5, 6] (Edinburgh University), which incorporate with
OntoSearch system, were built for the AKT consortium as well.
2
Knowledge Reuse: http://www.aktors.org/technologies/reuse/
The Semantic Web3 provides a common framework that allows data to be shared
and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It envisions
the globally interconnected network of machine-processable information, made
possible by means of the sharing of semantic data models or ontologies. Locating
suitable existing ontologies to capture the user-required information from the
Internet is a big challenge in the current research of the Semantic Web.
Finding a suitable ontology from the Internet is a hard task. There is still no good
tool to handle this problem. Google offers a powerful web search engine. However,
with regard to the ontology searching, it has its own problems, such as a lack of
visualization facilities. Google APIs 4 give us a chance to develop our own tool
(OntoSearch) to search the relevant ontology files to meet the user requirements.
In this article, we discuss the issue of searching for relevant ontologies on the
Internet and introduce our tool, OntoSearch. In section 2, we give some
background to our research and list some current problems. In section 3,
OntoSearch is introduced in detail. In section 4, some discussion and future work
are given followed by a brief summary.

2. Background
2.1 IKB: Identify Knowledge Base

Reuse of knowledge bases is a promising area in knowledge technologies and

many researchers are focusing on how to reuse existing knowledge bases for
different applications [1, 2]. Such requests for reuse are often specified as a
knowledge base (KB) characterisation problem:
Require knowledge base on topic T, conforming to the set of constraints C [2].
There are two key points here:
• Decide what the principal topic (T) of a given knowledge base is.
• Decide whether a KB conforms to certain constraints C.

As we noted, determining the principal topic of an existing knowledge base (KB) is

an important step in the reuse of knowledge bases. Identify-Knowledge-Base
(IKB) [2, 3] is a tool to suggest the principal topic(s) addressed by a knowledge
base. It matches concepts extracted from a particular knowledge base against some
reference taxonomy, where the taxonomy can be pre -stored or extracted from
ontologies which are either stored on the local machine or are accessible through
the WWW. The 'most specific' super-concept subsuming these extracted concepts
is said to be the principal topic of the knowledge base.

3
W3C Semantic Web: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
4
Google Web APIs: http://www.google.com/apis/
Here we give a simple example about a taxonomy of Food. Suppose we already
have the taxonomy depicted as in the next page:

Figure 1: Taxonomy showing different kinds of food

If the concepts {Apples, Pears} are extracted and passed to the IKB system, the
system would suggest that {Fruit} might be the focus of the knowledge base.
Similarly, if the concepts {Apples, Potatoes, and Carrots} are extracted, {Fruit-
vegetables} would be the output. If the set of concepts {Potatoes, Chicken, and
Game} is provided, topic {Food} would be returned as the result.
The IKB system is implemented in Java 5 . Jena6 , a Java API, is used to manipulate
RDF 7 models. The ExtrAKT system [4, 5, 6] developed at Edinburgh University is
used to extract concepts from a Prolog knowledge base and then passes them to the
IKB system.
There are two main inputs in the IKB system: extracted concepts from a KB and a
reference taxonomy. The concepts can be extracted by the ExtrAKT system.
However, choosing a suitable reference ontology is very hard. In using the IKB
system, we found that there are a huge number of ontologies available online; but
finding a relevant reference ontology for some particular KB is not an easy job at
all. (More discussions will be given later in the next section.) However, finding a
relevant reference ontology taxonomy is essential for using the IKB system.

2.2 Semantic Web

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is

given a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in
cooperation."
---- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila,
The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001[7]

The Semantic Web [8] provides a common framework that allows data to be
shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It

5
Java: http://java.sun.com/
6
Jena: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/bwm/rdf/jena/
7
Resource Description Framework (RDF): http://www.w3.org/RDF/
envisions a globally interconnected network of machine-processable information,
made possible by the sharing of semantic data models, which is also known as
ontologies.
The Semantic Web is a collaborative effort led by the World Wide Web
consortium8 with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial
partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which
integrates a variety of applications using XML9 for syntax and URIs for naming.
There are many people working in this area to improve, extend and standardize the
Semantic Web. Many documents and tools have already been developed. However,
Semantic Web technologies are still in the infancy and there are many challenges
in this area. One of the most important issues is to locate suitable existing
ontologies to capture the user-required information from the Semantic Web. For
example, if you want to publish your top ten favourite music tracks in Semantic
Web, you would like to find some ontologies that represent real-world things like
"artist", "track title", and "album". Otherwise, you will have to build these
ontologies yourself. However, to locate suitable ontologies from the Semantic Web
is currently far from easy and there is still no handy tool to help the users as we
know. So, we need to build a kind of "ontology Google" tool to kick-start this
process.

2.3 Google Application for ontologies

Nowadays, Google 10 is widely used to search for information on the Internet. With
the powerful facilities offered by Google, we can rapidly search many resources on
the web. The next question is: Can one use Google to locate an existing ontology,
which conforms to the user’s requirements? The answer is “Yes”. As pointed out
in [9], we can simply use the Google facility “filetype:” to limit the type of
searching file. For example, if we search in Google for “filetype:RDFs Food”, then
Google will return all the RDFs files with the keywords “Food”. So the user can
use Google to search for existing ontologies in different formalism, such as DAML
(+OIL) 11 , RDFs 12 , OWL13 , etc. and use (or reuse) them for their own needs.
It seems Google is a good way to help the user find suitable online Ontology
resources. However, after some experiments (basically focused on finding RDFs
files), we found it does not perform as expected; it is very hard to use Google to
search for suitable ontology files. There are several problems:
Firstly, ontologies are not always available for a particular topic/domain. Some
domains have many resources while others have very few.

8
W3C: http://www.W3C.org
9
Extensible Markup Language: http://www.w3.org/XML/
10
Google: http://www.Google.com
11
DAML(+OIL): http://www.daml.org/
12
Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-rdf-schema-20000327/
13
OWL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/
Secondly, Google returns links of relevant files, and the user will have to check if
they are really relevant. This can be very time consuming because Google does not
offer a quick way to browse ontology files.
Last but not least, Google searches files based on keywords supplied by the users.
It does not check the real content and structure of the files. Some (usually many)
irrelevant files will be returned to the user, just because they have the keywords
somewhere in their files. We quite often find many RDFs files, which contain the
required keywords, but on further examination of the ontology, we realised that the
files do not match our needs at all; that is, they do have the required keywords, but
they are not situated as required. For examp le, when we searched for a food
ontology using the keyword concept “Food”, ontologies about the Animal domain
are also returned, because the file contains a statement, such as “animal food
vegetarian”. Obviously, it is not really what we want. This kind of “mistakes” can
cost the user more time to find acceptable ontologies. Thus, Google’s keyword
searching is not good enough as an ontology search tool.
Google Web APIs are a free beta service to help programmers develop their own
google-based applications. With the Google Web APIs service, software
developers can query more than 4 billion web pages directly from their own
computer programs. Google uses SOAP14 and WSDL15 standards so a developer
can program in his or her favourite environment, such as Java, Perl16 , or Visual
Studio .NET.17 So, with the support of Google Web APIs, we can develop a more
specific tool to search for user-required ontologies from the Semantic Web.

3. Empirical Studies
3.1 Design of OntoSearch
As mentioned in the last section, finding ontologies to satisfy user requirements is
a very important issue, in both KB reuse and Semantic Web areas. There is no
existing tool to solve this problem. Google does have the power, but does not seem
to be specific enough to give good results.
After some experiments, we noticed that the problem arises because Google does
not offer a good visualization function for the ontology files (in different
formalisms, such as RDFs, etc.). As the user cannot view the ontology in an
intuitive graphic format, they have to look through the ontologies as structured text
files. This process takes a lot of time and cannot guarantee a good result, as the
plain text of the ontology cannot show the internal structure of the ontology clearly.
After reviewing some Ontology tools, we find that showing the hierarchy (structure)
of an ontology is very important to help the user to understand the nature of the
ontology. Most of the tools, such as ReTAX [10], Protégé [11], OntoEdit [12, 13],

14
SOAP: http://ws.apache.org/soap/
15
WSDL: http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
16
Perl: http://www.perl.org/
17
.NET: http://www.microsoft.com/net/
OilEd [14], WebODE [15] and OntoRAMA [16, 17], offer a facility of hierarchy
viewing to support the user to build and edit ontologies. A hierarchical view of
ontology seems to be a good way to give the user a quick overview of the selected
ontology. In this piece of work, we investigate the applicability of visualisation
techniques for ontology searching on the Internet.
To answer this question, we developed a visualization tool, OntoSearch, which
combines the Google search engine together with the RDFs ontology (hierarchy)
visualization technology. It helps the user search for relevant (based on keywords)
ontology files on the Internet and displays the files in a visually appealing way—a
hierarchy tree. The hierarchical view allows users to quickly review the structures
of different ontology files and select the relevant ontology files.
We show a diagrammatic overview of OntoSearch in Figure 2:

2. Search for
relevant
Google RDFs files RDFs files
Keywords
Engine

1. Input keywords 3. Return files to the user

4. Choose a file Chosen

User RDFs file

7. Select the 5. Viewing

file based on
the structure 6. Return the taxonomy view Taxonomy
Viewer

Selected
files
8. Save the useful ontology Final output:
Ontology library
i

Figure 2: Overview of OntoSearch18

The user inputs to OntoSearch the keywords to describe the nature of the required
ontology. Then OntoSearch applies the Google engine to search for RDFs files
related to the keywords and returns a list of relevant links (URLs) to the user. The
user then chooses some of the returned RDFs files and displays their structure, and

18
The rectangles in the figures represent processes while the ovals represent data
or information.
decides which of the files are relevant. Finally, the user select the relevant RDFs
files and saves them in a taxonomy library for future use.
As we now have the ontology-searching tool OntoSearch, we can link it to our
other tool IKB. Figure 3 discusses links between them and demonstrates how they
interoperate.

User KB

Keywords Concepts ExtrAKT

OntoSearch IKB Principal topic

of the KB

Ontology Relevant
library ontology

Figure 3: The relation between OntoSearch, IKB and ExtrAKT

3.2 Development of OntoSearch

The OntoSearch system is implemented in Java and JSP 19 . It is a web-based system,
which can offer online service based on JBoss20 . Jena, a Java API for manipulating
RDF models, is used to read the ontology (RDFs file) into Java. Google Web APIs
contribute to the Internet search engine. One JSP tag (tree tag 21 ) is applied to
visualize the hierarchy structure of the ontology.
The user can browse and use the OntoSearch interface using any web browser. The
user inputs keywords to describe the nature of the required ontology on the

19
JSP: http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/
20
JBoss: http://www.jboss.org/index.html
21
JSP Tree Tag (Version: 1.5): http://www.guydavis.ca/projects/oss/tags/
keyboard. Then, OntoSearch will apply the Google Web APIs to search the
Internet for relevant files (the file type is restricted as RDFs now but can be
changed) and return all the URLs on the screen. The user can select the files to
inspect their structures in a hierarchy tree view. Thus, the user can get a general
idea of the content and structure of the returned ontologies. Finally, the user can
save the relevant ontology on local disk.

3.3 Demonstration of OntoSearch

Next, an example of using OntoSearch is given. Suppose the user is looking for
some ontology in a Food domain. The required ontology should contain some real-
world knowledge about food and related issues. The user inputs the keyword
“Food” into OntoSearch. After searching, some RDFs files are returned as results,
which are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Search ontologies by keywords

As often many RDFs files are returned, the user then has to inspect them to check
if these files are really about the Food domain. As there is one file named
“Food.RDFs”, the user selects that one first. The content of that RDFs file is shown
as triples in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Show the triples of the example ontology

As shown in Figure 5, there is only one kind of triple in this ontology. All the
triples are “subClassOf” type of triple. All the concepts in this ontology are
subclasses (within several levels) of the food concept. Thus, we can think this
ontology is a hierarchy of different kinds of foods. In Fact, this ontology file does
match the user’s needs.
Figure 6 gives the hierarchy of that ontology. Obviously, this format is much easier
for the user to understand than the triple format which is shown in Figure 5.
 Figure 6: Hierarchy visualization of selected ontology

After viewing the hierarchy of the select ontology, the user makes the decision
whether the ontology is relevant to the requirement, and then proceeds to check
further returned ontologies.

4. Summary, Discussion and Future Work

As mentioned earlier, the OntoSearch system is a useful tool which can search for
ontology files from the Internet and visualize them as hierarchies. The next stage of
our work will be developing an advanced mode for OntoSearch system:
The current OntoSearch system is quite simple. It can only search for one type
(RDFs) of ontology file, and it only compares the user keywords with the contents
of the ontology files wherever they occur. And so it matches indiscriminately the
keywords both from concepts and comment fields. A future version of OntoSearch
will allow the user to choose different representational formalisms used to express
ontologies, and it will allow the user to specify the type of entity (concepts,
attribute or comments, etc.) to be matched.
Other future work includes:

• Creating a “library” of the Taxonomies

More experiments will be carried out, especially on particular domains to test our
OntoSearch system. The user-acceptable ontologies will be stored in a repository
for future use (eg. for use with IKB).

• WordNet22 application
The synonym problem is not well addressed in the current version of OntoSearch.
We are planning to incorporate WordNet in future versions so that our tool will be
more effective, ie it will retrieve a large number of relevant ontologies.

Acknowledgements
This work is supported under the EPSRC’s grant number GR/N15764 to the
Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration,
http://www.aktors.org/akt/, which comprises the Universities of Aberdeen,
Edinburgh, Sheffield, Southampton and the Open University.

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