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<Paper uid="W01-1005">
  <Title>Identification of relevant terms to support the construction of Domain Ontologies</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusion and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The text mining techniques proposed in this paper are meant to increase the productivity of an Ontology Engineer during the time consuming task of populating a Domain Ontology. The work presented in this paper is in part well assessed, in part still under development. We are designing new algorithms and techniques to widen the spectrum of information that can be extracted from texts and from other on-line resources, such as dictionaries and lexical taxonomies (like EuroWordnet, a multilingual version of Wordnet). An on-going extension of this research is to detect similarity relations among concepts on the basis of contextual similarity. Similarity is one of the fields (see Figure 1) in a concept definition form that are currently filled by humans.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One admittedly weak part of the research presented in this paper is evaluation: we could produce a numerical evaluation of certain specific subtasks (extraction of Named Entities and extraction of thesauric information), but we did not evaluate the overall effect that our text mining tools produce on the Ontology.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> However, we are not aware of any assessed Ontology evaluation methodology in the literature, besides (Farquhar et al. 1996) where an analysis of Ontology Server user distribution and requests is presented. A better performance indicator would have been the number of users that access Ontology Server on a regular basis, but the authors mention that regular users are only a small percentage7. As remarked in Subsection 3.1.2, an objective evaluation of an Ontology as a stand-alone artifact is not feasible: the only possible success indicator is the (subjective) acceptance/rejection rate of the Ontology Engineer when inspecting the automatically extracted information. An Ontology can only be evaluated in a context in which many users of a community (e.g. Tourism operators in our application) access the Ontology on a regular basis and use this shared knowledge to increase their ability to communicate, access prominent information and documents, improve collaboration. Though a field evaluation of OntoTour is foreseen during the last months of the project, we believe that wide accessibility and a long-lasting monitoring of user behaviors would provide the basis for a sound evaluation of the OntoTour system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 7 The system described by Farquhar and his colleagues, however, is not a specific Ontology, but a tool, Ontology Server, to help publishing, editing and browsing an Ontology.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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