Methods for Ontology Design and Ontology-driven Search
(partly supported by Estonian Science Fundation under the grant 4705)


The project aims to contribute to the development of methods for the automatic construction of application domain ontologies.

Our approach is based on automatic construction of domain-specific ontologies using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and FCA. The method constructs a formal concept lattice by algorithmic analysis of noun phrase patterns in domain-specific texts. Noun phrases are extracted from the text by NLP tools. Resulting set of noun phrases is stored into the database table, which represents a context for the application domain in the form of binary relationship between domain-specific texts and noun phrases. FCA makes it possible to construct a formal concept lattice of the context. Formal concept lattice obtained is considered as formal domain ontology for given application domain. Architecture of the prototypical ontology design tool OntoDesign is developed. OntoDesign is a system for automatically constructing domain ontologies from given domain-specific texts by using FCA.

The project team
1.    H-M. Haav (team leader)
2.    V. Kotkas
3.    K. Kindel