Evidence Sources, Methods and Use Cases for Learning Lightweight Domain Ontologies

By providing interoperability and shared meaning across actors and domains, lightweight domain ontologies are a cornerstone technology of the Semantic Web. This chapter investigates evidence sources for ontology learning and describes a generic and extensible approach to ontology learning that combines such evidence sources to extract domain concepts, identify relations between the ontology’s concepts, and detect relation labels automatically. An implementation illustrates the presented ontology learning and relation labeling framework and serves as the basis for dis- cussing possible pitfalls in ontology learning. Afterwards, three use cases demonstrate the usefulness of the presented framework and its application to real-world problems.