Ontology Extraction for Distributed Environments

Existing knowledge base resources have the potential to be valuable components of the Semantic Web and similar knowledge-based environments. However, from the perspective of these environments, these resources are often under-characterised, lacking the ontological characterisation that would enable them to be exploited fully. In this chapter we discuss a technique which can be applied to identify ontological knowledge implicit in a knowledge base. Based on this technique, a tool has been implemented which allows this knowledge to be extracted, thereby promoting the re-use of the resource. A discussion of some complementary research into brokering services within distributed knowledge architectures serves to illustrate the sort of environment in which such re-use might be enacted.