Enabling the development of base domain ontology through extraction of knowledge from engineering domain handbooks

Domain ontology, encompassing both concepts and instances, along with their relations and properties, is a new medium for the storage and propagation of domain specific knowledge. A significant problem remains the effort which must be expended during ontology construction. This involves collecting the domain-related vocabularies, developing the domain concept hierarchy, and defining the properties of each concept and the relationships between concepts. Recently several engineering handbooks have described detailed domain knowledge by organizing the knowledge into categories, sections, and chapters with indices in the appendix. This paper proposes the extraction of concepts, instances, and relationships from a handbook of a specific domain to quickly construct base domain ontology as a good starting point for expediting the development process of more comprehensive domain ontology. The extracted information can also be reorganized and converted into web ontology language format to represent the base domain ontology. The generation of a base domain ontology from an Earthquake Engineering Handbook is used to illustrate the proposed approach. In addition, quality evaluation of the extracted base ontology is performed and discussed.