Web schema construction based on web ontology usage analysis

Abstract

The ultimate vision of the semantic web is to enable computers to understand and process the information published on the web. This vision is being primarily achieved by web ontologies which semantically annotate the data. In order to effectively access the structured data mainly published in RDF format, one needs to understand not only the prevalent vocabularies being used by the community, but also the extent and the patterns of its usage. In this paper, we achieve this by proposing a framework that analyzes the domain ontology usage and rank terms (classes, properties and attributes) based on multi-criteria characteristics that include population, coverage, and structure. We consider a purpose-built RDF dataset to select the popular terms and construct the schema based on the ranking, enabling the semantic web application to acquire information from the web of data effectively and efficiently. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.