Towards building virtual vocabularies in the semantic web

Abstract

The development of ontologies in current Semantic Web is in a distributed and loosely-coupled way. Knowledge workers build their vocabularies in accessible web ontologies in their own manner. Two extreme cases are: many highly related concepts are defined separately in a set of tiny ontology fragments; while some massive ontologies defines a large set of concepts, which semantically belong to different areas. These cases bring a barrier to ontology reuse. In this paper, we propose an approach to semantically reorganizing concepts defined in various ontologies. We transform the reorganization problem to a graph clustering problem, and the result of reorganization is a set of virtual vocabularies for reuse. Experiments on a massive ontology repository show that our approach is feasible and efficient. © Springer-Verlag 2013.