The Semantics of COVID-19 Web Data: Ontology Learning and Population

Abstract

Background: The acquisition and exchange of meaningful, integrated, and accurate information are at the forefront of the combat against COVID-19; still, there are many countries whose health systems are disrupted. Moreover, no one is adequately equipped for COVID-19 contingencies. Many organizations have established static information systems to manage the information. This fact presents numerous issues, including delays, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies in COVID-19 information collected for pandemic control and monitoring. Objective: This paper presents a semantic representation of COVID-19 data, a domain ontology to facilitate measurement, clarification, linking, and sharing. We automatically generate a computer- intelligible knowledge base from COVID-19 case information, which contains machineunderstandable information. Furthermore, we have anticipated an ontology population algorithm from tabular data that delivers interoperable, consistent, and accurate content with COVID-19 information. Methods: We utilized the tabula package to extract the tables from PDF files and user NLP libraries to sort and rearrange tables. The proposed algorithm was then applied to all instances to automatically add to the input ontology using the Owlready Python module. Moreover, to evaluate the performance, SPARQL queries were used to retrieve answers to competency questions. Results: When there is an equivalence relationship, the suggested algorithm consistently finds the right alignments and performs at its best or very close to it in terms of precision. Moreover, a demonstration of algorithm performance and a case study on COVID-19 data to information management and visualization of the populated data are also presented. Conclusion: This paper presents an ontology learning/matching tool for ontology and populating instances automatically to ontology by emphasizing the importance of a unit's distinguishing features by unit matching.