Wikipedia as an ontology for describing documents

Identifying topics and concepts associated with a set of doc-uments is a task common to many applications. It can help in the annotation and categorization of documents and be used to model a person's current interests for improving search results, business intelligence or selecting appropriate advertisements. One approach is to associate a document with a set of topics selected from a fixed ontology or vo-cabulary of terms. We have investigated using Wikipedia's articles and associated pages as a topic ontology for this purpose. The benefits are that the ontology terms are devel-oped through a social process, maintained and kept current by the Wikipedia community, represent a consensus view, and have meaning that can be understood simply by reading the associated Wikipedia page. We use Wikipedia article