Web Ontology Learning and Engineering: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

The importance of domain ontologies is widely recognized, particularly in relationship to the expected advent of the so-called Semantic Web. An ontology is an infrastructure able to provide a precise account of the concepts characterizing a given application domain. It represents a shared understanding of a given reality, thus fostering better communication and cooperation among users, and interoperability among systems. Despite the significant amount of work in the field, ontologies are still scarcely used in Web-based applications. One of the main problems is the difficulty in defining the content, i.e., the identification and definition of relevant concepts in the domain. The solution proposed in this chapter starts from the idea that the corpus of documents produced by a community is the most representative (although implicit) repository of concepts. We present a method and a tool, OntoLearn — aimed at the extraction of knowledge from Web-sites and, more generally, from documents shared among the members of virtual organizations — to support the construction of a domain ontology.