FOCIH: Form-Based Ontology Creation and Information Harvesting

Abstract

Abstract.Creating an ontology and populating it with data are both labor-intensive tasks requiring a high degree of expertise. Thus, scaling ontology creation and population to the size of the web in an effort to create a web of data-which some see as Web 3.0-is prohibitive. Can we find ways to streamline these tasks and lower the barrier enough to enable Web 3.0? Toward this end we offer a form-based approach to ontology creation that provides a way to create Web 3.0 ontologies without the need for specialized training. And we offer a way to semi-automatically harvest data from the current web of pages for a Web 3.0 ontology. In addition to harvesting information with respect to an ontology, the approach also annotates web pages and links facts in web pages to ontological concepts, resulting in a web of data superimposed over the web of pages. Experience with our prototype system shows that mappings between conceptual-model-based ontologies and forms are sufficient for creating the kind of ontologies needed for Web 3.0, and experiments with our prototype system show that automatic harvesting, automatic annotation, and automatic superimposition of a web of data over a web of pages work well. Keywords: ontology generation from forms, information harvesting from the web, automatic annotation of web pages, web of data, Web 3.0.

Theoretical Foundations for Enabling a Web of Knowledge

“…We have also done some work on automated extractionontology construction [32,24,33,34] and some work on free-form query processing [36,2]. We nevertheless still have much work to do, even on fundamental WoK components such as creating a sharable data-frame library, constructing data frames for relationship sets, finding ways to more easily produce instance recognizers, reverse-engineering of many genres of semi-structured sources to extraction ontologies, enhancing query processing, incorporating reasoning, and addressing performance scalability.…”

“…Third we can create extraction ontologies automatically (although they likely need some enhancement) [32]. Fourth we can turn the process around and let users specify ontologies via nested forms [33].…”

Conceptual Modeling Foundations for a Web of Knowledge

“…This method works particularly well when the information to be collected for the KB comes from machine-generated collections of semi-structured web pages such as those commonly found in most hidden-web/deep-web sites. FOCIH (Forms-based Ontology Creation and Information Harvesting) [TEL09] is a tool that lets users specify ontologies without having to know any conceptual-modeling language or any ontology language. We observe that forms are a natural way for humans to collect information.…”

Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems

“…the representations used in DOM, XPath, XQuery, XSL, and XML Schema. [33]. 1 shows an example of an XML tree in which nodes are labelled by their names (chosen from a suitable set N ames of element and attribute names) and annotated by their kind: E for element, A for attribute, and S for text (PCDATA).…”

“…The confluence of CS LP OD can be proved using local confluence as stated by Newman's lemma [33]. According to [33] in fact a noetherian rewriting system is confluent if it is locally confluent.…”