First Meeting with Ernesto (and Robin)

Met with Ernesto to discuss the project in broad strokes. Robin was also there as he and I will be working together for the start of our projects.

My project is to add to the existing ConcepTool system the ability to learn ontologies from websites. This means that many of the tools I will make use of, such as lexical reasoning, will be taken from ConcepTool. This software platform is apparently in quite a tightly coupled state, and must be used in an all-or-nothing way. Robin's project is to make the platform more modularised, with the option to plug-in the modules you wish to use.

In essence, I am a client of Robin's, asking him to provide me with ConcepTool in a modularised form so that I can develop my system easily.

My first task is to research the Business Case for my project: what is the motivation behind it and where could it prove useful.

From Ernesto's notes:
Most ontologies are either automatically developed & then human-validated, or not built at all (consider the industrial cost-effectiveness of ontologies and developing them. We can therefore pitch this system as a semi-automatic ontology learner for businesses without the funds or time to manually develop them.

Create ontologies on the fly to browse catalogues and web pages in a better way: Allow the user to view many websites with the same navigatory structure, using each site's ontology to map between the user's own representation and that of the website.

Items received from Ernesto:
Learning path for myself and Robin

An intelligent system for the extraction of ontological knowledge from text: Ernesto's specification of my project.

Ontology learning for the semantic web: Outline by Ernesto of this area of research.

OntoElicitor: extraction expressive domain ontologies from text: Paper by Ernesto and Chris Mellish.