Abstract

While classifications are heavily used to categorize web content, the evolution of the web foresees a more formal structure -- ontology - which can serve this purpose. Ontologies are core artifacts of the Semantic Web which enable machines to use inference rules to conduct automated reasoning on data. Lightweight ontologies bridge the gap between classifications and ontologies. A lightweight ontology (LO) is an ontology representing a backbone taxonomy where the concept of the child node is more specific than the concept of the parent node. Formal lightweight ontologies can be generated from their informal ones. The key applications of formal lightweight ontologies are document classification, semantic search, and data integration. However, these applications suffer from the following problems: the disambiguation accuracy of the state of the art NLP tools used in generating formal lightweight ontologies from their informal ones; the lack of background knowledge needed for the formal lightweight ontologies; and the limitation of ontology reuse. In this dissertation, we propose a novel solution to these problems in formal lightweight ontologies; namely, faceted lightweight ontology (FLO). FLO is a lightweight ontology in which terms, present in each node label, and their concepts, are available in the background knowledge (BK), which is organized as a set of facets. A facet can be defined as a distinctive property of the groups of concepts that can help in differentiating one group from another. Background knowledge can be defined as a subset of a knowledge base, such as WordNet, and often represents a specific domain.