A Semantic Search Engine for the International Relation Sector.

The Royal Institute Elcano Juan Sebastián Elcano was a Spanish explorer, who commanded back home the first successful expedition to circumnavigate the globe in 1522. (Real Instituto Elcano) in Spain is a prestigious independent political institute whose mission is to comment on the political situation in the world focusing on its relation to Spain. As part of its dissemination strategy it operates a public website. In this paper we present and evaluate the application of a semantic search engine to improve access to the Institute's content: instead of retrieving documents based on user queries of keywords, the system accepts queries in natural language and returns answers rather than links to documents. Topics that will be discussed include ontology construction, automatic ontology population, semantic access through a natural language interface and a failure analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]