Eliciting Ontology Components from Semantic Specific-Domain Maps: Towards the Next Generation Web

The present-day Web can be broken into smaller pieces that slowly but surely will be transformed into semantic Web pieces. This paper describes an approach for eliciting ontology components by using specific-domain maps. The knowledge contained in a particular domain, any kind of digital archive, is portrayed by assembling and displaying its ontology components. The novelty of our approach is to offer clustering and visualization features not present in other techniques helping in the semi-automatic construction of ontologies by identifying components from digital archives. We describe here a case study that applies our approach on an academic domain. The specific-domain maps generated are presented and a conceptualized ontology created with the ontology components is introduced. Further processing may be carried out on the extracted knowledge to be embedded on the semantic Web pages for software agents to use. The ultimate kind of semantic Web software applications that we will be seeing are intelligent software agents searching the Web to infer and extract new knowledge from the digital archives.