Pruning-based Identification of Domain Ontologies

Raphael Volz (FZI Research Center for Information, Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany)

Rudi Studer (FZI Research Center for Information, Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany)

Alexander Maedche (FZI Research Center for Information, Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany)

Boris Lauser (Library + Documentation Systems Division, FAO of the UN, Italy)

Abstract: We present a novel approach of extracting a domain ontology from large-scale thesauri. Concepts are identified to be relevant for a domain based on their frequent occurrence in domain texts. The approach allows to bootstrap the ontology engineering process from given legacy thesauri and identifies an initial domain ontology that may easily be refined by experts in a later stage. We present a thorough evaluation of the results obtained in building a biosecurity ontology for the UN FAO AOS project.

Keywords: knowledge management, ontologies, pruning, structural computing

Categories: H.3.7, H.5.4