Learning Expressive Ontologies

Learning Expressive Ontologies

This publication advances the state-of-the-art in ontology learning by presenting a set of novel approaches to the semi-automatic acquisition, refinement and evaluation of logically complex axiomatizations. It has been motivated by the fact that the realization of the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee is still hampered by the lack of ontological resources, while at the same time more and more applications of semantic technologies emerge from fast-growing areas such as e-business or life sciences. Such knowledge-intensive applications, requiring large scale reasoning over complex domains of interest, even more than the semantic web depend on the availability of expressive, high-quality axiomatizations. This knowledge acquisition bottleneck could be overcome by approaches to the automatic or semi-automatic construction of ontologies. Hence a huge number of ontology learning tools and frameworks have been developed in recent years, all of them aiming for the automatic or semi-automatic generation of ontologies from various kinds of data. However, both the quality and the expressivity of ontologies that can be acquired by the current state-of-the-art in ontology learning so far have failed to meet the expectations of people who argue in favor of powerful, knowledge-intensive applications based on logical inference. This work therefore takes a first, yet important, step towards the semi-automatic generation and maintenance of expressive ontologies.

Learning Expressive Ontologies

Ontology Learning and Population

The promise of the Semantic Web is that future web pages will be annotated not only with bright colors and fancy fonts as they are now, but with annotation extracted from large domain ontologies that specify, to a computer in a way that it can exploit, what information is contained on the given web page. The presence of this information will allow software agents to examine pages and to make decisions about content as humans are able to do now. The classic method of building an ontology is to gather a committee of experts in the domain to be modeled by the ontology, and to have this committee.