Abstract

The simplicity and proliferation of the World Wide Web (WWW) has taken the availability of information to an unprecedented level. The next generation of the Web, the Semantic Web, seeks to make information more usable by machines by introducing a more rigorous structure based on ontologies. One hinderance to the Semantic Web is the lack of existing semantically marked-up data. Until there is a critical mass of Semantic Web data, few people will develop and use Semantic Web applications. This project helps promote the Semantic Web by providing content. We apply existing information-extraction techniques, in particular, the BYU ontologybased data-extraction system, to extract information from the WWW based on a Semantic Web ontology to produce Semantic Web data with respect to that ontology. As an example of how the generated Semantic Web data can be used, we provide an application to browse the extracted data and the source documents together. In this sense, the extracted data is superimposed over or is an index over the source documents. Our experiments with ontologies in four application domains show that our approach can indeed extract Semantic Web data from the WWW with precision and recall similar to that achieved by the underlying information extraction system and make that data accessible to Semantic Web applications.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/