Imaging Words - Wording Image

The rapid growth of the Internet information sources has led to organizing proposals, such as the Semantic Web initiative, with its ontological level providing a formal structuring for this disparate data. But given the amount of information to be treated even in a restricted domain, manual organization becomes rapidly unmanageable, and automatic methodologies for ontology building are required. Here we describe techniques for the automatic construction of a image ontology based on multimedia data (text and images) for a specific class of objects, manmade tools. Our approach combines modification of existing lexical resources and search engine querying in order to obtain raw images. These images are then clustered into representative concepts for the ontology. Our automated approach can be applied to any subset of physical objects.