Ontology-aware Search and Analytics with Elasicsearch: Case study for Epidemiological Investigation

Inverted index is widely used for semantic search using ontology. Elasticsearch is inverted index-based open source search engine and has several advantages such as scalability. In this paper, we propose a method to achieve ontology-aware semantic search and analytics with Elasticsearch. Our proposed method is based on combination of semantic indexing and query expansion, and enables search and analytics by structured and keyword queries for both structured and text data. Experimental results for epidemiological investigation showed that proposed method has enough capabilities for practical semantic search, especially with semantic analytics function considering ontological relationships in near real-time.