Automated Construction and Growth of a Large Ontology
Fabian M. Suchanek, Gerhard Weikum, Rudi Studer · Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics · 2009
An ontology is a computer-processable collection of knowledge about the world. This thesis explains how an ontology can be constructed and expanded automatically. The proposed approach consists of three contributions: \\begin{enumerate} \\item A core ontology, YAGO.\\\\ YAGO is an ontology that has been constructed automatically. It combines high accuracy with large coverage and serves as a core that can be expanded. \\item A tool for information extraction, \\leila.\\\\ \\leila\\ is a system that can extract knowledge from natural language texts. \\leila\\ will be used to find new facts for YAGO. \\item An integration mechanism, SOFIE.\\\\ SOFIE is a system that can reason on the plausibility of new knowledge. SOFIE will assess the facts found by \\leila\\ and integrate them into YAGO. \\end{enumerate} Each of these components comes with a fully implemented system. Together, they form an integrative architecture, which does not only gather new facts, but also reconcile them with the existing facts. The result is an ever-growing, yet highly accurate ontological knowledge base. A survey of applications of the ontology completes the thesis.