Codifying Collaborative Knowledge: Using Wikipedia as a Basis for Automated Ontology Learning

In the context of knowledge management, ontology construction can be considered as a part of capturing of the body of knowledge of a particular problem domain. Traditionally, ontology construction assumes a tedious codification of the domain experts' knowledge. In this paper, we describe a new approach to ontology engineering that has the potential of bridging the dichotomy between codification and collaboration turning to Web 2.0 technology. We propose to shift the primary source of ontology knowledge from the expert to socially emergent bodies of knowledge such as Wikipedia. Using Wikipedia as an example, we demonstrate how core terms and relationships of a domain ontology can be distilled from this socially constructed source. As an illustration, we describe how our approach achieved over 90% conceptual coverage compared with Gold standard hand-crafted ontologies, such as Cyc. What emerges is not a folksonomy, but rather a formal ontology that has nonetheless found its roots in social knowledge.