Text mining techniques to automatically enrich a domain ontology

Though the utility of domain ontologies is now widely acknowledged in the IT (Information Technology) community, several barriers must be overcome before ontologies become practical and useful tools. A critical issue is the ontology construction, i.e., the task of identifying, defining, and entering the concept definitions. In case of large and complex application domains this task can be lengthy, costly, and controversial (since different persons may have different points of view about the same concept). To reduce time, cost (and, sometimes, harsh discussions) it is highly advisable to refer, in constructing or updating an ontology, to the documents available in the field. Text mining tools may be of great help in this task. The work presented in this paper illustrates the guidelines of SymOntos, ontology management system, and the text mining approach adopted herein to support ontology building. The latter operates by extracting, from the related literature, the prominent domain concepts and the semantic relations among them.