Reusing domain ontologies

The increasing interest in the semantic web is producing a growing number of publicly available domain ontologies. These ontologies are a rich source of information that could be helpful during the process of engineering other domain ontologies. Existing ontologies could be reused in whole or in part to bootstrap the creation of ontologies for new semantics-aware applications. We introduce automatic techniques to select an existing ontology that is most closely related to the domain of a given small set of Web documents.;One common way for users to organize personal interests is to categorize information by topics. Each area of interest could be represented either by a simple concept label or by more complex information structures that include concepts linked to each other by user defined relationships. This type of information structure could be easily represented by domain ontologies. We need automatic tools that help non-expert users build and maintain their own ontologies. The techniques explored and described in this dissertation can make this process more accessible. Based on the proposed algorithms we implemented "miology" a Web-based demonstration application that shows how our approach can work to maintain personal user interests.