Ontology research and development. Part 1 - a review of ontology generation

Ontology is an important emerging discipline that has the huge potential to improve information organization, management and understanding. It has a crucial role to play in enabling content-based access, interoperability, communications, and providing qualitatively new levels of services on the next generation of Web transformation in the form of the Semantic Web. The issues pertaining to ontology generation, mapping and maintenance are critical key areas that need to be understood and addressed. This timely survey is presented in two parts. This first part reviews the state-of-the-art techniques and work done on semiautomatic and automatic ontology generation, as well as the problems facing these researches. The second complimentary survey is dedicated to ontology mapping and ontology evolving. Through this survey, we identified that shallow information extraction and natural language processing techniques are deployed to extract concepts or classes from freetext or semi-structured data. However, relation extraction is a very complex and difficult issue to resolve and it has turned out to be the main impediment to ontology learning and applicability. Further researches are encouraged to find appropriate and efficient ways to detect or identify relations through semi-automatic automatic means.