Objectives

With regard to solutions for the purpose of business networking that allow not only to conduct structured database queries, but which are also capable of identifiying similarities, common interests or hidden relations, the combinaton of concepts such as ontologies with semantic and linguistic analysis represents a promising approach.

SERENA aims to explore such a combination as part of an innovative approach to information retrieval. Based upon that a recommender system is going to be designed, which will explore and evaluate the user behavior as well as succesful matching processes in order to provide the users with additional recommendations of potentially interesting partners. The system therefore combines classical approaches of information retrieval with semantic technologies, data mining approaches, linguistic analysis and collaborative filtering elements derived from the field of social computing.

Overall the project has the following objectives:

1. To develop a useable and transferable concept for the currently unresolved challenges encountered in information retrieval, which can be implemented in different applications.
2. To create a more intelligent search engine to ultimately be used in the global biotechnology database Biotechgate, which will make it possible to, for example, search for a keyword such as "cancer" and also receive all results for "oncology".