Construction of Domain Ontologies: Sourcing the World Wide Web

As the World Wide Web evolves into the Semantic Web, domain ontologies, which represent the concepts of an application domain and their associated relationships, have become increasingly important as surrogates for capturing and representing the semantics of real world applications. Much ontology development remains manual and is both difficult and time-consuming. This research presents a methodology for semi-automatically generating domain ontologies from extracted information on the World Wide Web. The methodology is implemented in a prototype that integrates existing ontology and web organization tools. The prototype is used to develop ontologies for different application domains, and an empirical analysis carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of the research.