A Methodology for Engineering Domain Ontology using Entity Relationship Model

Ontology engineering is an important aspect of semantic web vision to attain the meaningful representation of data. Although various techniques exist for the creation of ontology, most of the methods involve the number of complex phases, scenario-dependent ontology development, and poor validation of ontology. This research work presents a lightweight approach to build domain ontology using Entity Relationship (ER) model. Firstly, a detailed analysis of intended domain is performed to develop the ER model. In the next phase, ER to ontology (EROnt) conversion rules are outlined, and finally the system prototype is developed to construct the ontology. The proposed approach investigates the domain of information technology curriculum for the successful interpretation of concepts, attributes, relationships of concepts and constraints among the concepts of the ontology. The experts' evaluation of accurate identification of ontology vocabulary shows that the method performed well on curriculum data with 95.75% average precision and 90.75% average recall.