Creating a text-based query

The semantic-based Natural Language Search Interface is designed to be used by domain experts because it uses domain ontologies to provide natural language search facilities. It permits the formulation of text-based queries using terms used in ontologies (i.e. concepts, attributes, relations, attribute values, and individuals). It semantically analyses natural language queries using ontologies and maps them to ontological triple structures by means of graph navigation algorithms.

This tutorial shows you how to create natural language queries using the semantic-based Natural Language Search Interface of the Semantic Search Engine.

•	This tutorial assumes you already know how to load an ontology to the Semantic Search Engine. For a description on how to do this please consult with the Load an Ontology topic.

Creating a query:

1.	Load an ontology in the Semantic Search Engine. Here we load the Product Design ontology:

Now you can start formulating a natural language query by typing the query in the corresponding text field in the bottom of the Query pane. The query must contain terminologies defined in the loaded ontology. The loaded ontology contains among others the concepts SoftwareTool and Task. Below you can see a natural language query which asks for software tools that support a specific task, namely meshing.

Note: The ontology contains concepts that are represented as single strings without blanks, e.g. SoftwareTool or CompilationPlatform. You can use either these terms in your query or you can create a natural language query by splitting these concepts into their individual words as illustrated in the query above. Instead of writing SoftwareTool you can write software tools. The semantic-based Natural Language Search interface is able to recognize plural terms and to treat search terms with upper and lower case letters.

3.	To submit the query click on the Submit button in the bottom of the Text-based query panel (see previous picture).

4.	After submitting the query the results are displayed in a new web page: