Using Rule Ontology in Repeated Rule Acquisition from Similar Web Sites

Inferential rules are as essential to the Semantic Web applications as ontology. Therefore, rule acquisition is also an important issue, and the Web that implies inferential rules can be a major source of rule acquisition. We expect that it will be easier to acquire rules from a site by using similar rules of other sites in the same domain rather than starting from scratch. We proposed an automatic rule acquisition procedure using a rule ontology RuleToOnto, which represents information about the rule components and their structures. The rule acquisition procedure consists of the rule component identification step and the rule composition step. We developed A* algorithm for the rule composition and we performed experiments demonstrating that our ontology-based rule acquisition approach works in a real-world application.