Background and Foreground Knowledge in Dynamic Ontology Construction: Viewing Text as Knowledge Maintenance

Brewster, Mr. Christopher and Ciravegna, Prof. Fabio and Wilks, prof. Yrick (2003) Background and Foreground Knowledge in Dynamic Ontology Construction: Viewing Text as Knowledge Maintenance. In Proceedings Proceedings of the Semantic Web Workshop, SIGIR, Toronto, Canada.

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Ontologies have become a key component in the Semantic Web and Knowledge management. One accepted goal is to construct ontologies from a domain specific set of texts. An ontology reflects the background knowledge used in writing and reading a text. However, a text is an act of knowledge maintenance, in that it re-enforces the background assumptions, alters links and associations in the ontology, and adds new concepts. This means that background knowledge is rarely expressed in a machine interpretable manner. When it is, it is usually in the conceptual boundaries of the domain, e.g. in textbooks or when ideas are borrowed into other domains. We argue that a partial solution to this lies in searching external resources such as specialized glossaries and the internet. We show that a random selection of concept pairs from the Gene Ontology do not occur in a relevant corpus of texts from the journal Nature. In contrast, a significant proportion can be found on the internet. Thus, we conclude that sources external to the domain corpus are necessary for the automatic construction of ontologies.

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