Populating Ontologies in the eTourism Domain

The semantic Web vision is based on structuring the knowledge that is present in the current Web so that it is understandable by machines without human intervention. Ontologies are the backbone technology for the semantic Web. Thus, the realization of the semantic Web vision largely depends on the design and instantiation of ontologies. While several methodologies for designing ontologies and automating ontology learning have been proposed, ontology population has not received much attention so far. This paper presents a methodology for populating ontologies from natural language Web documents. For this, semantic Web technologies and natural language technologies have been used. This approach has been applied in the eTourism domain.