Abstract:

This paper describes the development of an information retrieval approach that could assist inexperienced student-researchers to seek academic resources using local language context (i.e. Bahasa Malaysia). Two main problems were identified when using the current system which comprises of keyword search. First, language barrier limits students’ abilities to conduct keyword search in foreign language (i.e. English). Second, student’s lack of experience in querying often results in obtaining irrelevant search outcomes. Thus, a semantic search approach which applies an ontology-based search is proposed to overcome the aforementioned problems. This paper aims to present the system framework design, its ontological development and querying results based on a study done at a local university in Malaysia.