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The Ontology-Supported Web Search Engine contains only information about famous people.

Please note that the famous people ontology is currently limited to information about approximately 5000 American singers (not including band members), 3000 basketball players and a few other sports players and politicians. We are working on improving the ontology.

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How does the Ontology-Supported Web Search (OSWS) System work?

The OSWS System provides search suggestions based on your input, every time you types a new character. To start, just type a name of a famous person. For example, Michael Jackson, Tony Bennett or George Bush.

What you will see:

After every new letter that you type, the system will display the names of up to 4 matching famous people stored in the ontology. Every text line contains a suggested completions that is constructed based on the knowledge in the ontology.

Different senses of a homonymous term are visually separated by horizontal lines of two different widths and different background colors. Different colors indicate different occupations. Thin lines separate different people with the same name [typed up to this point!] and the same occupation.

To better help you choose the desired homonym, the result screen is split vertically and show result page snippets for the different homonymous terms next to each other. If you move the mouse to one of those suggested completions and stay there for a selectable time period (2 seconds by default), the system will show the result page snippets for the specific homonym which you hover over.

Options:

If you move the slider (see below) you can adjust the minimum time required to hover over a selected completion to bring up the corresponding snippets.

If you click on the Negative Search Terms checkbox (see below) then the negative search terms get involved in the suggested completions. The idea of using negative search terms is that the suggestions being used as positive search terms for one homonym should be introduced as negative search terms for other homonyms. Many search engine users appear to be unfamiliar with the meaning of a minus sign (–) in front of a search word. Thus the system shows [but not] instead of the minus sign in front of the negative terms.

If you click on the little blue right arrow (see below, located to the left of the check box), you will see the suggested completions of the less popular homonyms (beyond the top 4).

Note that the numbers to the right change from 1-4 to 5-8 (see below, bottom right). This indicates the homonymous terms now showing are ranked 5th to 8th in popularity. We currently use search engine hit counts to rank the homonyms. If you click on the little blue left arrow (located on the left of the blue right arrow) you will see the suggestions of the more popular homonyms.

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The Ontology-Supported Web Search system is an ongoing project at the Computer Science Department of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

If you have any questions please contact james.geller@gmail.com