Information retrieval studies the recovery of documents from a collection for a given user information need expressed with a query. An early and widely known IR system is SMART from Cornell University. We have extended the public domain IR system SMART with an ontology-based query expansion module in order to improve the system performance. The proposed Bachelor's project will consist in developing a web interface which will (1) allow a user to input a query in the field of molecular biology, (2) call the query expansion module and display the expanded query for the user to view and possibly modify, (3) submit the approved query to the IR system, (4) display the retrieved documents, and (5) log the different operations for a posteriori analysis. Development will take place in a Unix/Linux environment.
Interested students should contact (email: antonio.jimeno@cui.unige.ch / Office Number: 358).