Automatic evaluation of ontologies

Abstract

We can observe that the focus of modern information systems is moving from data processing towards concept processing, meaning that the basic unit of processing is less and less an atomic piece of data and is becoming more a semantic concept which carries an interpretation and exists in a context with other concepts. An ontology is commonly used as a structure capturing knowledge about a certain area by providing relevant concepts and relations between them. Analysis of textual data plays an important role in construction and usage of ontologies, especially with the growing popularity of semi-automated ontology construction (here referred to also as ontology learning). Different knowledge discovery methods have been adopted for the problem of semi-automated ontology construction [10] including unsupervised, semi-supervised and supervised learning over a collection of text documents, using natural language processing to obtain semantic graph of a document, visualization of documents, information extraction to find relevant concepts, visualization of context of named entities in a document collection. © 2007 Springer-Verlag London Limited.