The Acquisition of Class Definitions in the Commodity Ontology of Agricultural Means of Production

The agricultural means of production is also called the means of agricultural production. The previous work focused on constructing the means of agricultural production commodities ontology taxonomy. After finishing constructing the ontology taxonomy, adding the detail information to the ontology are the following work. The detail information includes classes’ definitions, properties, relations, instances and axioms. The classes’ definitions are the concrete domain knowledge manifestation. Therefore they can be used to learn class's properties and relations. This paper focuses on obtaining these definitions. To this end, the most important work is to determine where to obtain class's definitions. This paper discusses the selective process. According to authority, completeness, accuracy, practicability and computerization, compares three kinds of knowledge sources, and then selects online “Encyclopedia of China” as the knowledge source. Analyzes the encyclopedia website and its entries, and then proposes an automatic method to get class definitions. The experiment shows that nearly 70% of classes can get their definitions. Using Jena API to add the definitions to the ontology model represented in OWL format.