ONTOLOGY POPULATION: AN APPLICATION FOR THE E-TOURISM DOMAIN

摘要

The Semantic Web aims to extend the current Web standards and technologies so that the semantics of Web contents is machine processable. For the Semantic Web vision to become real, methods and mechanisms that assist in the creation of an initial pool of semantically described Web resources have been developed. However, these methods suffer from some problems such as lack of scalability and automation. Besides, most of them focus on English language resources and the cost of initial requirements is too high. In order to solve these drawbacks, this paper proposes a methodology for extracting semantic content from textual web documents to automatically instantiate a domain ontology (i.e., ontology population). In a first stage, the system obtains, through the GATE framework, a set of semantic annotations which are considered as ontology instance candidates. In a second stage, the semantic ambiguities are solved, and the annotations are related with their corresponding ontological entities. The methodology has been tested in a tourism domain corpus and the results of the validation process seem promising in terms of precision and recall.