Onto-thesaurus for tamil language: Ontology based intelligent system for information retrieval

The word ontology refers to the hierarchical structure of entities and their relationships. The entities are nodes and each node is dominated by their parent node in the hierarchical structure. The nodes are related by semantic and lexical relations such as synonymy, homonymy, meronymy, antonymy, etc. Hierarchical structure is created for different types of semantic domains. The top domains are entities, events, abstracts and relationals and the hierarchical structure is converted into a visual representation using tree viewer. This paper describes in detail about the building of ontological structure for Tamil vocabulary and how the ontological structure is converted in to a visual knowledge representation and user friendly retrieval system. All types of lexical and semantic relationship between lexical items are captured by using unique notations. The overall system is ontology based intelligent system for information retrieval and along with the ontology implementation, thesaurus based on ontology called as Onto-thesaurus also described in this paper. Onto-thesaurus tool plays effective role in information retrieval, researching and education platform, especially for teaching, training and learning purpose.