Journal of Computer Science 8 (10): 1667-1673, 2012
ISSN 1549-3636
© 2012 Science Publications
Corresponding Author: Ouail Ouchetto, Department Mathemtics and Computer Science, Faculty of SJES, Hassan II Ain Chok University,
Casablanca, Morocco
1667
Relevance Ranking for Services Retrieval
1
Ouail Ouchetto,
2
Hassania Ouchetto and
2
Ounsa Roudies
1
Department Mathemtics and Computer Science,
Faculty of SJES, Hassan II Ain Chok University, Casablanca, Morocco
2
Department Computer Science,
Mohammadia School of Engineers, Mohammed Vth University-Agdal, Rabat, Morocco
Absract: Problem statement: One of the challenges of e-gov systems is to provide, during a
search process, relevant services that meet user expectations. Indeed, obtaining relevant
information responding to user queries is a difficult process. It becomes even complex when the
query terms have many meanings and do not fit with the vocabulary used by the services.
Approach: We propose an appropriate method to assess the adequacy of rendered services. This
new method is based on a mathematical representation. It is based on calculating the relevance
weight of each service by using the semantic equivalence. Results: Validation of this method was
done in two times. Initially, it was implemented and integrated in a retrieval system. In a second
step, it was made available to a number of users to give their judgment. Conclusion: The
experiments show a high level of satisfaction of this method by improving the quality of the
relevance ranking. The relevant services are presented in the first page and the order of relevance
decreases with the pages.
Key words: Relevance ranking, services retrieval, semantic layer
INTRODUCTION
For the computer industry, the personalization of
information is a major issue in the context of enterprise
information systems, electronic commerce, electronic
government and the knowledge access. The relevance
of the provided information, its intelligibility and its
adaptation to use and user preferences constitute the
factors that determine the success of implementing
such systems.
In the e-government systems, access to
information and to the relevant services which fit to
both the user context and user requirements represents
a huge challenge for governments. This is due to many
factors: the complexity of these systems, the diversity
of the actors involved in the search process and the
proliferation of heterogeneous resources constituting
these systems (structured data, text documents,
components). Therefore, information's diversity and
user’s disorientation are the main reasons of non-user's
satisfaction of e-government services during a search
process (Ouchetto et al., 2012).
In a process of searching an e-gov service or
information, the user information needs are often
expressed by using some keywords and short phrases.
Different query terms can be used to retrieve services.
However, the user often does not build a query which
accurately reflects his needs because of: (i) the user
perspectives and terminological habits (ii) the difficulty
of formulating a query, (iii) non-mastery of the
vocabulary used by e-gov services and (iv) control's
lack of the user's real needs who prefers to look in the
long results' lists which do not meet his/her
expectations than to look for the appropriate keywords.
To resolve this problem, we believe that the
integration of a method for evaluating the services'
appropriateness, as an important element in the search
process of e-gov services, becomes an absolute
necessity. The assistance to be brought is related to the
final presentation of services. The principle is as
follow: the user starts the search with a fixed need and
a specific context, the system takes the keywords of the
query. It enriches the query by including the semantics
of these keywords. Afterwards, it calculates the weight
of the retrieved services. Finally, it orders them in
descending order before presenting them to the user.
Related work: Research communities in the field of
information retrieval believe that relevance is a
strategic point in all personalization systems. Its
purpose is to make information relevant to the user. To
achieve this goal, they developed several methods to
improve the user’s query, based on additional
knowledge of the user. These methods are
complemented by query expansion algorithms to
remove the ambiguity of the meaning of terms used in
the user’s query (Bhogal et al., 2007).