User-Driven Ontology Population from Linked Data Sources

Abstract

In order for ontology-based applications to be deployed in real-life scenarios, significant volumes of data are required to populate the underlying models. Populating ontologies manually is a time-consuming and error-prone task and, thus, research has shifted its attention to automatic ontology population methodologies. However, the majority of the proposed approaches and tools focus on analysing natural language text and often neglect other more appropriate sources of information, such as the already structured and semantically rich sets of Linked Data. The paper presents PROPheT, a novel ontology population tool for retrieving instances from Linked Data sources and subsequently inserting them into an OWL ontology. The tool, to the best of our knowledge, offers entirely novel ontology population functionality to a great extent and has already been positively received according to user evaluation.