Modeling context through domain ontologies

Traditional information retrieval systems aim at satisfying most users for most of their searches, leaving aside the context in which the search takes place. We propose to model two main aspects of context: The themes of the user's information need and the specific data the user is looking for to achieve the task that has motivated his search. Both aspects are modeled by means of ontologies. Documents are semantically indexed according to the context representation and the user accesses information by browsing the ontologies. The model has been applied to a case study that has shown the added value of such a semantic representation of context.