The construction of ontology : top-down approach vs bottom-up approach

Abstract

本体构建旨在对知识体系的概念和关系建模并形成体系化的知识,从而辅助计算机进行智能化的处理。上位本体包含的概念是与领域无关的通用概念集,而多数通过算法自动提取而获得的本体主要用于特定领域的概念知识。本文首先介绍在本体构建中领域核心本体(也称中位本体)和应用(也称下位本体)之间的关系。然后以计算机领域为例,阐述一个如何利用英文的上位本体SUMO通过"自上而下"的方法建立的中位本体。基于下位本体的特性,本文进而介绍一种"自下而上"的本体构建方法。 Ontology construction aims to build conceptual knowledge in such a way that the relations among major concepts can be explicitly identified and presented in a machine operable way so as to assist in intelligent processing of computer applications. An upper-level ontology includes general concepts that are used broadly across different domains whereas ontologies acquired by computing through algorithms automatically are more likely to be domain specific. This paper first introduces domain specific core ontology ( mid-level ontology) and application domain ontology ( lower-level ontology) . Then,it presents a top-down approach to build a core ontology for Chinese in the IT domain based on the English upper level ontology SUMO and other English-Chinese resources available. The paper also introduces a bottom-up approach to build domain specific ontology using corpus based approach.