Concept similarity measuring method for ontology based on field theory

For the problem that current methods for concept similarity in ontology considered the concept information or concept relationship in isolation, a field theory-based concept similarity measuring method was proposed. The method defined that the semantic relationship between concepts was decided by the information that concepts contained and the implicit concept relationship was induced from the explicit concept relationship. The information of concept was divided into common information and special information. Based on above conclusion and field theory, ontology was mapped into a semantic field which had the similar characters with physical field. Common information was taken as semantic gravity elements and special information was taken as semantic distance. The gravity field model was used to calculate the concept similarity. To meet the requirement of armored vehicle and ship's design, the ontology-base semantic search software was developed. The effectiveness and correctness of the proposed method were also validated through comparing with other five kinds of similarity measuring methods.