# An Ontology-Driven Personalized Faceted Search for Exploring Knowledge Bases of Capsicum
## 1 Introduction
### Motivation  
A solution to overcome the knowledge understanding discrepancy of a domain of interest is to use an ontology-based approach. An ontology--shared, explicit and formal conceptualizations of a domain [7]--describes a knowledge-based program through the definition of a set of representational terms. As a set of objects and relationships among them, a common ontology is highly suitable for a variety of knowledge-sharing activities to guarantee consistency.  
To share knowledge about plant anatomy, morphology, and the stages of plant development, the Plant Ontology (PO) has been developed and continuously expanded [8]. PO adopts the data model of the Gene Ontology (GO) [9] to annotate gene expression and phenotype data of plant structures and stages of plant development. As a common reference ontology for plant structures and development stages, the PO solves terminology disparities used by scientists from different projects and groups. The PO has been used to integrate multiple online plant genomics portals and databases, such as the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) ([[https://arabidopsis.org](https://arabidopsis.org)]([https://arabidopsis.org](https://arabidopsis.org)) (accessed on 28 June 2021)), the Sol Genomics Network (SGN) ([[https://solgenomics.net](https://solgenomics.net)]([https://solgenomics.net](https://solgenomics.net)) (accessed on 28 June 2021)), the Maize Genetics and Genomics Database (MaizeGDB) ([[https://maizeGDb.org](https://maizeGDb.org)]([https://maizeGDb.org](https://maizeGDb.org)) (accessed on 28 June 2021)), the Oryzabase Database ([[http://shigen.nig.ac.jp](http://shigen.nig.ac.jp)]([http://shigen.nig.ac.jp](http://shigen.nig.ac.jp)) (accessed on 28 June 2021)), and the Gramene Database ([[http://gramene.org](http://gramene.org)]([http://gramene.org](http://gramene.org)) (accessed on 28 June 2021)) to name a few.  
The PO has been used successfully to share knowledge among scientists, for example, to accurately describe the plant development stages across species [10]. Unfortunately, the ontology was designed to share knowledge among scientists who have knowledge about the subject. It is not necessarily consumable by non-expert users, those who are not familiar with the subject. These non-expert users include students, young scientists, or even citizen scientists concerned with the knowledge. This group of users has been recognized as an essential research tool due to its capability in providing data at an extensive scale and fine-grained resolution [11]. Besides being powerful in providing large amounts of data, citizen scientists could convey information to the public more conveniently [6].  
Based on the previously described situations, we outlined a few things that motivated our work as follow:  
1. The PO can be used to describe plant characteristics, from anatomy and morphology to the stages of plant development. It is suitable to share knowledge among scientists but not necessarily with non-expert users.
2. For non-expert users, when describing a less familiar object (for example, a flower of a plant), they tend to describe it based on generic properties or attributes. For example, to describe the petal of a flower, they would describe it based on familiar properties such as color, size, texture, etc.