Automatic Creation and Simplified Querying of Semantic Web Content: An Approach Based on Information-Extraction Ontologies

The semantic web represents a major advance in web utility, but it is currently difficult to create semantic-web content because pages must be semantically annotated through processes that are mostly manual and require a high degree of engineering skill. Furthermore, users need an effective way to query the semantic web, but any burden placed on users to learn a query language is unlikely to garner sufficient user support and interest. Unfortunately, both the creation and use of semanticweb pages are difficult, and these are precisely the processes that must be made simple in order for the semantic web to truly succeed. We propose using information-extraction ontologies to handle both of these challenges. In this paper we show how a successful ontology-based dataextraction technique can (1) automatically generate semantic annotations for ordinary web pages, and (2) support free-form, textual queries that will be relatively simple for end users to write.