Abstract

Most users of the WWW want their searches to be effective. Currently, there exists a wide variety of efficient syntactic tools that have can be used for search in the WWW. With the continuous increase in the amount of information, effective search will not be possible in the future only with syntactic tools. On the other hand, people have remarkable abilities at the moment of retrieving and acquiring information. For example, a librarian is capable of knowing, with great precision, what a client seeks by asking a small set of questions. Motivated by the efficiency of that process, we have created a web search system prototype based on ontologies that uses a cognitive model of the process of human information acquisition. We have built a prototype of a search system whose output better meets the expectations of the users compared to tools based only on syntax. Using this model, the prototype "understands" better what the user is looking for. © Springer-Verlag 2004.