Building domain ontology based on Web data and generic ontology

The automatic or semi-automatic construction of ontology has become a research topic of interest in recent years. This paper describes a mechanism for constructing domain specific ontologies automatically based on web data and generic ontology. Firstly, we employ the hierarchical agglomerative clustering(HAC) algorithm, clustering web pages hierarchically and resulting in a binary tree. Then an algorithm is proposed, which selects from the binary tree the significative nodes as topics implying concepts of domain interests. Lastly, the Chinese generic ontology, HowNet, is introduced to evolve the topics (together with their hierarchical structures) into domain ontology. We experiment our method in the field of computer hardware based on web pages collected from Chinese BtoC web sites. An in-depth discussion on the experiment results is also given. ? 2004 IEEE.EI