Modeling user's cognitive structure in contextual information retrieval

In contextual information retrieval, the retrieval of information depends on the time and place of submitting query, history of interaction, task in hand, and many other factors that are not given explicitly but implicitly lie in the interaction and surroundings of searching, namely the context. User's cognition is one of important contextual factors for understanding his or her personal needs. We propose a model called DOSAM to get user's individual cognitive structure on domain knowledge. DOSAM is developed from the spreading-activation model of psychology and is established on the domain ontology. The cost analysis of algorithm shows that it is feasible to get cognitive structure by DOSAM. Personalized search experimental results on digital library indicate that DOSAM can help improve the search effectiveness and user's satisfaction.