Web ontology building system for novice users: A step-by-step approach

Abstract

This paper proposes a system for building Web ontologies for novice users. Web ontology plays a central role in Semantic Web applications, and is utilized for various purposes. Systems for building ontologies have been extensively studied in diverse ways. However, Web ontology is not widely exploited in many applications, in part because ontology construction requires expert knowledge. To allow novice users to create ontologies, we propose a system for building Web ontologies. In the proposed system, the process of building ontologies is divided into several steps. A user is provided with step-by-step instructions, and enters information either in the form of a web page or by choosing from a list of words. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the proposed system, and show how Web ontology building can be assisted in an example application of a disaster mitigation system. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.