Semantic Search System for Common Cultural Traditions of the Greater Mekong Subregion

This article presents the development of a semantic search system for the common cultural traditions of the Greater Mekong Subregion, which has been studied using common cultural tradition data from Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Our system presents the implementation of semantic search to solve the problem of semantic gaps in common cultural characteristic concepts for information access and retrieval. The field of cultural heritage management represents a growing area of research that contains valuable information for users, researchers, and domain experts. Finding information on traditions or cultures of interest among unstructured materials requires a laborious search process. In this paper, we demonstrate how to extract semantic entities and relationships represented in the information using the theory of information science, specifically the Knowledge Organization (KO) approach, which involves determining the concepts and semantic relations of a particular issue and establishing their relations with relevant concepts. It serves as a foundation for knowledge structure development and ontology development, which contribute to effective information searching and knowledge access. The system was developed based on systematic ontology using the Hozo Ontology Editor and Database and ontology mapping using the Ontology Application Management (OAM) framework, which helps distinguish between relevant and irrelevant data, thereby leading to search effectiveness. To cut down on the time wasted in browsing and searching, reduce associated user frustration, and support the research of domain experts, more selective user access is needed.