Finding Appropriate Semantic Web Ontology Terms from Words

Abstract

The Semantic Web was designed to unambiguously define and use ontologies to encode data and knowledge on the Web. Many people find it difficult, however, to write complex RDF statements and queries because doing so requires familiarity with the appropriate ontologies and the terms they define. We describe a system that automatically maps a set of ordinary English words to a set of appropriate ontology terms on the Semantic Web. We use the Swoogle Semantic Web search engine to provide ontology terms and ontology correlation statistics, the WordNet lexical database to resolve synonyms, and a practical three step approach to find the most suitable ontology context as well as appropriate ontology terms.