A Framework for Ontology Based Semantic Search System in Ayurvedic Medicine

India is known for its traditional medicinal system such as Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy. Ayurveda plays a significant role in curing the diseases without any side effects. Medicinal plants or herbs are considered as a major resource in meeting the need of people health care. Information about this medicinal knowledge must be preserved and digitized. There have been a massive number of publications and large number of articles on ayurvedic research in the form of unstructured textual data. Text mining approach is used to provide the solution to handle such voluminous of unstructured data. With the exponential growth of text based data, navigating the relevant information needed is the challenging task. Semantic understanding of document content forms the vital requirement for ensuring the quality of content retrieval. However, the current approaches are finding variation in textual classification in bringing the classification accuracy which may fail to understand the data during classification. Hence, an efficient model is required to search, classify and retrieve the most relevant data. The main objective of this research is to develop an effective and efficient framework and algorithm to search and retrieve the most relevant facts by including the application of ontology-based text mining approach. The current status of research is analyzed and reviewed in the area of semantic web retrieval, ontology-based approaches and various classification technique for building the framework. Text mining with the special emphasis on understanding the semantic meaning of content is achieved by using domain ontology called medicinal plant ontology construction. The challenges in finding the semantically related content for the given query are achieved through semantic web and ontology which enriched the data on web for structured representation thereby providing the strong semantics in knowledge representation. The methodology of information extraction is implemented by using medicinal plant ontology with semantic knowledge representation, an algorithm called OCEC (Ontology based Concept Extraction and Classification) was developed where each term is described semantically by mapping the terms and its related terms in the medicinal plant ontology. The web language called Web Ontology Language (OWL) is used for knowledge representation and is considered as richer semantic description language for describing unstructured and semi-structured content on the web thereby extracting the exact and relevant data and to offer a strong semantic search. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, less relevant and most relevant documents were collected from online sources and digital libraries. Comparative study has been performed with various classification techniques. The experimental results show that the proposed method out performed. To further prove the efficiency of the model, experiments were conducted by giving different queries and the results are compared with other existing methods. The results show that the content retrieved by the proposed model improves precision and recall results. Keyword : Traditional Medicine, Ayurveda, Ontology, Semantic Web, Web Ontology Language