A Semantic Similarity Measure for the SIMS Framework

The amount of currently available digital information grows rapidly. Relevant information is often spread over different information sources. An efficient and flexible framework to allow users to satisfy ef- fectively their information needs is required. The work presented in this paper describes SIMS (Semantic Information Management System), a ref- erence architecture for a framework performing semantic annotation, search and retrieval of information from multiple sources. The work pre- sented in this paper focuses on a specific SIMS module, the SIMS Semantic Content Navigator, proposing an algorithm and the related implementa- tion to calculate a semantic similarity measure inside an OWL ontology. This measure is based on ontology structure and on the information pro- vided by attributes and relations that are defined inside the ontology. This work is the result of a collaborative effort between the DINFO (Depart- ment of Computer Science and Engineering) and the research team of En- gineering - Ingegneria Informatica.