Ontological Profiles as Semantic Domain Representations

Ontologies are conceptualizations of some domain, defining its concepts and their relationships. An interesting question is how do we relate the ontological concepts to the general vocabulary of the domain? In this paper we present the concept of ontological profiles, what they are, how they are constructed, and how they may be used. We propose that the ontological profile is a link between the vocabulary of the domain and its conceptual specification given by the ontology. This means that the ontological profile can be tailored to a specific document collection, reflecting the vocabulary actually used. Finally we demonstrate how the ontological profile may be utilized for ontology-driven search.