User-Centric Faceted Search for Semantic Portals

Many semantic portals use faceted browsing, where the facets are based on the underlying indexing ontologies of the content. However, in many cases, like in medical applications, the ontologies may be very large and complex, and do not provide the end-user with intuitive facet hierarchies for conceptualizing the content, for formulating queries, and for classifying the search results. We argue that in such cases end-user facets should be separated from the annotation ontologies, and show how to generalize the semantic view-based search paradigm to take into account this fact. A user-centric card sorting method is proposed for designing intuitive views for the end-users and a method for mapping its facets onto the indexing ontologies and search items is presented. The system has been implemented in a prototype of the semantic portal TerveSuomi.fi, a national health promotion portal in Finland.