Combining Case-Based Reasoning and Semantic Indexing in a Question-Answer Service

This paper argues that knowledge technologies can be utilized in creating question-answer services on the semantic web. To ease the content indexer’s work, we propose semi-automatic semantic indexing for annotating question-answer pairs and case-based reasoning techniques for finding similar questions. To provide answers matching with the indexer’s and end-user’s information needs, methods for combining case-based reasoning with semantic search and browsing are proposed. A real life ontology-based question-answer application OPAS is presented as a proof of concept.