EasyOnt : a semi-automatic ontology learning system

Abstract

The Semantic Web complements the original World Wide Web as it offers a common framework that enhances reusability and sharing of information over the Internet, as well as across different applications. An ontology within the Semantic Web context is a machine-readable structure that represents knowledge on a specific topic or domain of discourse by linking concepts with relations. Ontologies have become popular due to their critical role as main elements in the Semantic Web. The main disadvantage of ontologies is that they are challenging to construct, combined with the fact that domain experts are not always ideal programmers. This factor leads to the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, and so, the need for a tool that assists a non-ontology expert to create and modify existing ontologies is becoming more significant. The purpose of this thesis is to semi-automate the learning process to develop a lightweight domain-specific ontology, by developing a tool in the form of an ontology editor plugin to assist a particular domain expert during the process.