A semi-automatic approach for building ontologies from a collection of structured web documents

Abstract

Many collections of structured documents are available on the web. The collection generally describes the characteristics of entities from a single type, where each page describes one entity. These documents are adequate knowledge sources for building ontologies. As they benefit from a strong and shared layout, they contain less well written text than plain text files but their architecture is very meaningful. Classical linguistic-based methods for identifying concepts and relations are no longer appropriate for analyzing them. The approach we propose in this paper exploits various properties of such documents, combining layout/formatting analysis and linguistic analysis, and using semantic annotation.