An incremental method for meaning elicitation of a domain ontology

Internet has opened the access to an overwhelming amount of data, requiring the development of new applications to automatically recognize, process and manage informationavailable in web sites or web-based applications. The standardSemantic Web architecture exploits ontologies to give a shared(and known) meaning to each web source elements.In this context, we developed MELIS (Meaning Elicitation and Lexical Integration System). MELIS couples the lexical annotation module of the MOMIS system with some components from CTXMATCH2.0, a tool for eliciting meaning from severaltypes of schemas and match them. MELIS uses the MOMIS WNEditor and CTXMATCH2.0 to support two main tasks in theMOMIS ontology generation methodology: the source annotationprocess, i.e. the operation of associating an element of a lexicaldatabase to each source element, and the extraction of lexicalrelationships among elements of different data sources.