An ontology development approach using concept maps driven by automatic term extraction

Abstract

A number of ontology engineering methodologies have been proposed to date. Distinct methodologies rely on different techniques and activities for developing ontologies. The concept mapping technique has been recently used for developing ontologies related to different domains. However, the existing approaches using concept mapping do not make use of any automatic term extraction process to ease the overall ontology development process and their evaluation procedures are not robust to specifically meet the need for ontology designs emerging from concept maps. This paper proposes a new approach which uses the concept mapping technique coupled with a term extraction engine. The engine automatically extracts the candidate terms from the competency questions which reduces ontology development time and efforts. Furthermore, considering the importance of evaluation, a robust evaluation procedure is proposed which validates the ontologies at both the formal level and the graphical level.