Ontologies have a chequered past in the business arena, although many significant benefits have been realised over the past two decades in biological and medical research. Wrapped up in the AI hype and occasionally lumped in with knowledge management projects or taxonomy projects they are often shelved curiosities whose original purpose is lost by their champions. What is an ontology? Generally speaking, it is a set of concepts, their properties and the relationships that link the concepts together.

 

Creating specialized ontologies using Wikipedia: The Muninn Experience.

Wikipedia Academy 2012

Paper Session III, Saturday June 30, 10:30-11:30

 

Abstract:

This paper reports on the experiences of the Muninn project in creating specialized ontologies for historical governmental and military organizations using the Wikipedia data set and its linked open data companion DBpedia.  The motivation for the ontologies and the extraction methods used are explained and their performances reviewed.  Overall Wikipedia is a very accurate knowledge base from which multilingual concepts can be extracted.  The caveat is that while the information is almost always present, it is not always straightforward to retrieve because of missing structures or categorization information. Hence, an iterative methodology has been found to work best in extracting information from Wikipedia.