Knowledge extraction from classification schemas

Abstract

The availability of formal ontologies is crucial for the success of the Semantic Web. Manual construction of ontologies is a difficult and time-consuming task and easily causes a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Semi-Automatic ontology generation eases that problem. This paper presents a method which allows semi-automatic knowledge extraction from underlying classification schemas such as folder structures or web directories. Explicit as well as implicit semantics contained in the classification schema have to be considered to create a formal ontology. The extraction process is composed of five main steps: Identification of concepts and instances, word sense disambiguation, taxonomy construction, identification of non-taxonomic relations, and ontology population. Finally the process is evaluated by using a prototypical implementation and a set of real world folder structures. © Springer-Verlag 2004.