Building up a class hierarchy with properties by refining and integrating Japanese Wikipedia Ontology and Japanese WordNet

Previously, we constructed the Japanese Wikipedia Ontology JWO via a semi-automatic process using the Japanese Wikipedia, but it had problems due to a lack of upper classes and appropriate definitions of properties. Thus, the aim of the current study was to complement the upper classes in JWO by refining and integrating JWO and Japanese WordNet JWN to build a class hierarchy with defined properties based on the considerations of property inheritance. To achieve this, we developed tools that help users to refine the class-instance relationships, to identify the JWO classes that need to be aligned with JWN synsets, and to align the JWO classes with the JWN synsets via user interaction. We also integrated JWO and JWN using a domain ontology development environment, DODDLE-OWL. We also propose a method for building a class hierarchy with defined properties by elevating the common properties defined in sibling classes to higher classes in JWO.