A large number of papers and reports that have been published after the Napoli RPC97 workshop show an impressive progress in improving the RPC performances and extending their use to new "elds of application. This talk is an attempt to summarize the state of the art at the beginning of the present workshop as an introduction to the new results that will be presented. A discussion about the scal...

Ontology learning concerns the development of automatic methods for the extraction of a domain model from a relevant, i.e. domain-specific data set. In the context of ontology evolution, a specific domain model is already given and the task of ontology learning reduces to the extension or adaptation of this domain model on the basis of a changing underlying data set. Ontology learning largely b...