Building Domain Ontologies Out of Folksonomies and Linked Data

Abstract

In this paper we propose an automatic method for building domain ontologies where we leverage the emerging vocabulary from social tagging systems, and the existing semantics in the Linked Open Data cloud to enrich semantically the terms that shape the domain ontology. We systematically capture a domain vocabulary by searching for relevant resources in the folksonomy graph using a spreading activation strategy. We use the vocabulary to identify domain classes and relationships among them by querying knowledge bases published as linked data. We present a case study in the financial domain where we experiment with different settings and show the feasibility of our approach using real folksonomy data.