An Ontology-Based Extraction Framework for a Semantic Web Application

Abstract

The Semantic Web vision is rapidly becoming a mainstream reality, but obstacles remain in the way. A major challenge is the adoption of practical Semantic Web applications and the production of vast stores of ubiquitous meta-data which is needed to allow robust inference engines to attain the goals of machine readability of web documents. The authors propose the Semantic Web Applications (SEMWAP) framework which facilitates semi-automatic matching of instance data from opaque web databases using lightweight ontology terms. This framework combines information retrieval, information extraction, natural language processing, and ontology techniques to produce a matching and thus provides a viable building block for Semantic Web applications. To experimentally investigate the characteristics and limitations of the SEMWAP framework, a prototype system called the Semantic Ontological Data Labeler (SODL) was constructed.