Faceted lightweight ontologies

Abstract

We concentrate on the use of ontologies for the categorization of objects, e.g., photos, books, web pages. Lightweight ontologies are ontologies with a tree structure where each node is associated a natural language label. Faceted lightweight ontologies are lightweight ontologies where the labels of nodes are organized according to certain predefined patterns which capture different aspects of meaning, i.e., facets. We introduce facets based on the Analytico-Synthetic approach, a well established methodology from Library Science which has been successfully used for decades for the classification of books. Faceted lightweight ontologies have a well defined structure and, as such, they are easier to create, to share among users, and they also provide more organized input to semantics based applications, such as semantic search and navigation. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.