Testing Your Project with the New Ontolection

Now the fun begins! As a simple test of conceptual search with the new ontolection, re-display the refinement-project project, and click the refinement-project link in the left-hand navigation column of the Watson™ Explorer Engine administration tool. A generic Watson Explorer Engine search screen displays.

To verify that the spelling variations ontolection that we used earlier in this tutorial is still working correctly, enter the word railroad in the text area and click Search.

Next, let's experiment with some of the related terms that were defined in the ontolection-francis ontolection. Replace the word railroad in the search field with the word car and press return.

To verify that the new ontolection is indeed being used, click the Show Expansions link below the query field. The Show Expansions dialog displays.

Click the deselect all for this term checkbox at the bottom of the dialog, and click Update Search to re-run your query without using the synonyms found in the ontolection. This query returns 18 results, indicating that one of the synonyms specified in the ontolection-francis ontolection is indeed producing an extra search result.

If you're curious which synonym is producing the extra result, you can examine the snippets provided with each search result and look for the highlighted term(s). In this example, you can see that one of the results contains the word auto, which is one of the synonyms for car. You could also repeat the search multiple times, each time selecting a different one of the suggested expansions.

The previous examples have shown the value of the synonyms that were defined in the seed for the ontolection-francis ontolection. To see the impact of alternate terms identified in relationships such as related terms, replace the search term auto with the term detective and press return.

Click Show Expansions to display the expansions that are available or used for the term detective.

The synonym investigator for the term detective is pre-selected, as in the previous example. However, note that the related terms Tommy Flat and Ty Roberts are not selected by default. Let's experiment with this a bit.

First, deselect the synonym investigator and click Update Search to re-run your query.

You can see that the synonym investigator added no real value to the search. Click Show Expansions again to redisplay the expansions dialog. Re-enable the synonym investigator, enable the related suggestion Tommy Flat, and click Update Search.

This section has shown that the alternate terms provided in an XML Thesaurus can help you locate search results that might otherwise have eluded you due to your choice of query terms. Watson Explorer Engine conceptual search capabilities can be extremely valuable, especially in enterprise or academic environments that already have domain-specific thesauri or similar ontologies. These ontologies can be quite large, having evolved over time to contain a substantial amount of domain-specific knowledge. The ability of Watson Explorer Engine to incorporate these into your enterprise applications automatically builds the accumulated expertise of your corporate thesauri and vocabularies into those applications.

To proceed with this tutorial, click Modifying Default Expansions and Suggestions.