Application and Role of Ontologies in Biomedical Information Retrieval Systems

Ontologies improve the quality of information retrieval (IR). Therefore, it is important to better know the process of ontology engineering and their application in IR. The aim of this research was to identify the engineering methods of ontologies and also their application in biomedical IR.
This review was done through library research method with an analytical approach. Required information for the review was retrieved from Pubmed, Scopus and Web of Science using keywords: "Ontology-based biomedical Information Retrieval", "Information Retrieval", "Biomedical Information Retrieval", "Ontology engineering", "Ontology construction", "Biomedical Ontology" and "Ontology building" without time limit. Five articles addressing an ontology-based biomedical IR system were reviewed.
Studies on ontology based biomedical IR, started in 2004, are not limited to a single country. In general, ontologies are used to manage the semantic metadata. Although most IRs try to develop their own ontologies, reuse of earlier ontologies is a priority. The material for developing ontologies is taken from the literature in the domain. The studied ontologies have been produced by centralized approaches and decentralized approaches and different groups have not been used.
The main purpose of systems for applying ontologies is using them to develop semantic metadata for helping machine reasoning.