Construction of Engineering Domain Ontology through Extraction of Knowledge from Domain Handbooks

Domain ontology, encompassing both concepts and entities, along with their relations and properties, is a new medium for the storage and propagation of domain specific knowledge. For all of its associated advantages, a great deal of effort must still be expended during ontology construction, including collecting the domain-related vocabularies, developing the domain concept hierarchy, defining the properties of each concept and relationships between concepts. In recent years, several engineering handbooks have described detailed domain knowledge via organization into categories, sections, and chapters with indices in the appendix. In this paper, an approach is proposed with a view to extracting concepts, entities, properties and relationships from a handbook of a specific domain. The extracted information can then be reorganized and converted into OWL (Web Ontology Language) format to represent the domain ontology. The generation of an earthquake engineering ontology from an Earthquake Engineering Handbook is used to illustrate the proposed approach.