Text-based Construction and Comparison of Domain Ontology : A Study Based on Classical Poetry

1. Knowledge Structure: shared upper ontology and domain ontology The fact that people from different backgrounds may have knowledge structures unlike ours is a crucial issue to be addressed in knowledge engineering. In order to become sharable and reusable knowledge, all extracted information must first be correctly situated in a knowledge structure. In addition, the situated information must be allowed to transfer from knowledge structure to knowledge structure without losing its meaningful content. This is the vision behind the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO, http://www.ontologyportal.org) proposed by an IEEE working group. A shared upper ontology will both anchor the structured transfer of knowledge as well as set a standard for the construction of a middle and lower level ontology for each domain. This vision also has promising applications in the Semantic Web. The most salient factors dictating variations in knowledge structures are time, space, and domain. These factors are compounded with language, which is both the product and conduit of the conceptual structure of its speakers. In order to demonstrate the felicity of the shared upper ontology approach, we need to show that it can successfully applied to comparative studies of different knowledge structures regardless of their ontological variations. We apply the shared ontology proposal to the interpretation historical texts by adopting the Shakespearean-garden approach towards construction of historical ontology.