A framework enabling semantic search in health service ecosystems

The health service ecosystem is a sub domain of the service ecosystem, which is an ecological view of the health service domain. Due to the importance and the speciality of health services, service consumers have rigorous requirements regarding the efficiency of health service search engines. However, as most health service consumers do not have enough domain knowledge, their service queries are sometimes not able to denote their actual service requests. Moreover, we find that the existing health service search engines lack the ability to help the consumers to disambiguate their service queries, which may impede the efficiency of the search engines. In this paper, by means of semantic search technologies, we design a framework enabling user query disambiguation in the health service ecosystem. The framework embodies a health service ontology for domain knowledge-based user query disambiguation and an ECBR algorithm for accurate service retrieval. In order to evaluate the framework, we build a system prototype and perform a series of experiments on it. Conclusions from the evaluation are drawn in the paper.