Extracting a Domain-Specific Ontology from a Corporate Intranet

In: Proceedings of CoNLL-2000 and LLL-2000, pages 167-175, Lisbon, Portugal, 2000. Extracting a Domain-Specific Ontology from a Corporate Intranet JSrg-Uwe Kietz and Raphael Volz Swiss Life, Corporate Center, IT Research ~z Development, Zfirich, Switzerland uwe. kietz@swisslife, ch, ed. raphael@leahpar, de Alexander Maedche AIFB, Univ. Karlsruhe, D-76128 Karlsruhe, Germany maedche@aifb, uni-karlsruhe, de Abstract This paper describes our actual and ongoing work in supporting semi-automatic ontology ac- quisition from a corporate intranet of an in- surance company. A comprehensive architec- ture and a system for semi-automatic ontology acquisition supports processing semi-structured information (e.g. contained in dictionaries) and natural language documents and includ- ing existing core ontologies (e.g. GermaNet, WordNet). We present a method for acquir- ing a application-tailored domain ontology from given heterogeneous intranet sources. 1 Introduction 1.1 Need for focused access to knowledge The amount of information available to corpo- rate employees has grown drastically with the use of intranets. Unfortunally this growth of available information has made the access to useful or needed information not much easier as the access is usually based on keyword searching or even browsing. The focused access to knowl- edge resources like intranet documents plays a vital role in knowledge management and sup- ports in general the shifting towards a Semantic Web. Keyword searching results in a lot of irrele- vant information as a term can have different meanings in distinct contents, e.g. "Ziirich" as the name of a town and as the name of an in- surance company. Presently it is quite difficult to provide this information to the search engine, e.g. exclude all the information about the town "Ziirich" without losing information about the insurance company "Ziirich'. The project On-To Knowledge builds an ontology-based tool environment to perform knowledge management dealing with large num- bers of heterogeneous, distributed and semi- structured documents as found within large in- tranets and the World-Wide Web (Fensel et al., 2000). In this project ontologies play a key role by providing a common understanding of the domain. Semantically annotated documents are accessed using the vocabulary provided by a domain-specific ontology. Providing the user with an access method based on ontological terms instead of keywords has several advantages. First, the abstraction given by the ontology provides that the user does not have to deal with document-specific representations. Second, by this abstraction ro- bustness towards changes in content and format of the accessed documents is gained. 1.2 Semi-automatic vs. manual ontology construction The required domain-specific ontologies for On- To-Knowledge are built manually. Ontolo- gies are usually built using tools like OntoEdit (Staab and Maedche, 2000) or Protege (Grosso et al., 1999). Using such tools has simplified on- tology construction. However, the wide-spread usage of ontologies is still hindered by the time- consuming and expensive manual construction task. Within On-To-Knowledge our work evalu- ates semi-automatic ontology construction from texts as an alternative approach to ontology en- gineering. Based on the assumption that most concepts and conceptual structures of the do- main as well the company terminology are de- scribed in documents, …

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