Putting things in context: A topological approach to mapping contexts to ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies and contexts are complementary disciplines for modeling views. In the area of information integration, ontologies may be viewed as the outcome of a manual effort to model a domain, while contexts are system generated models. In this work, we provide a formal mathematical framework that delineates the relationship between contexts and ontologies. We then use the model to handle the uncertainty associated with automatic context extraction from existing documents by providing a ranking method, which ranks ontology concepts according to their suitability to a given context. Throughout this work we motivate our research using QUALEG, a European 1ST project that aims at providing local governments with an effective tool for bi-directional communication with citizens. We empirically evaluate our model using two real-world data sets, coming from Reuters and news RSS. Our empirical analysis shows that the input needed to accurately define a concept by a context is small, and the classification of documents to concepts is accurate. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.