Constructing Domain Ontology Using Structural and Semantic Characteristics of Web-Table Head

This study concerns the constructing of domain ontology from web tables in a specific domain. Ontology defines the common terms and their meaning (concepts) within a context. Thus only meaningful tables are our concern. The meaningful table is composed of a head and a body, which are formatted in rows and columns. The head abstracts the meaning expressed in the body. Thus, in order to obtain a table-information-extraction framework, this study extracts, as prerequisite work, the structural semantic, that is, the domain ontology that frames web-table information, from the head. We suggest a method for automatically extracting domain ontology using the structural and semantic characteristics of the web-table head. The construction of domain ontology proceeds through two steps: (a) extracting table schema as pseudo-ontology from each table from the same domain and (b) constructing domain ontology combining those extracted table schemata. The combination of schemata proceeds through splitting and clustering using (a) statistical information and (b) heuristics based on the structural and semantic characteristics of the web-table head.