Analysing the Problem and Main Approaches for Ontology Population

Knowledge systems are a suitable computational approach to solve complex problems and to provide decision support. Ontologies are an approach for knowledge representation and Ontology Population looks for instantiating the constituent elements of an ontology, like properties and non-taxonomic relationships. Manual population by domain experts and knowledge engineers is an expensive and time consuming task. Thus, automatic or semi-automatic approaches are needed. This paper discusses the problem of Automatic Ontology Population and proposes a generic process specifying its phases and what kind of techniques can be used to perform the activities of each phase. Some techniques representing the state of the art of this field are also described along with the solutions they adopt for each phase of the AOP process with their advantages and limitations. This work is part of HERMES, a Brazil/Portugal research cooperation project looking for techniques and tools for automating the process of ontology learning and population.