The promise of the Semantic Web is that future web pages will be annotated not only with bright colors and fancy fonts as they are now, but with annotation extracted from large domain ontologies that specify, to a computer in a way that it can exploit, what information is contained on the given web page. The presence of this information will allow software agents to examine pages and to make decisions about content as humans are able to do now. The classic method of building an ontology is to gather a committee of experts in the domain to be modeled by the ontology, and to have this committee agree on which concepts cover the domain, on which terms describe which concepts, on what relations exist between each concept and what the possible attributes of each concept are. All ontology learning systems begin with an ontology structure, which may just be an empty logical structure, and a collection of texts in the domain to be modeled. An ontology learning system can be seen as an interplay between three things: an existing ontology, a collection of texts, and lexical syntactic patterns. The Semantic Web will only be a reality if we can create structured, unambiguous ontologies that model domain knowledge that computers can handle. The creation of vast arrays of such ontologies, to be used to mark-up web pages for the Semantic Web, can only be accomplished by computer tools that can extract and build large parts of these ontologies automatically. This book provides the state-of-art of many automatic extraction and modeling techniques for ontology building. The maturation of these techniques will lead to the creation of the Semantic Web.

The promise of the Semantic Web is that future web pages will be annotated not only with bright colors and fancy fonts as they are now, but with annotation extracted from large domain ontologies that specify, to a computer in a way that it can exploit, what information is contained on the given web page. The presence of this information will allow software agents to examine pages and to make decisions about content as humans are able to do now. The classic method of building an ontology is to gather a committee of experts in the domain to be modeled by the ontology, and to have this committee.

Perspectives on Ontology Learning brings together researchers and practitioners from different communities − natural language processing, machine learning, and the semantic web − in order to give an interdisciplinary overview of recent advances in ontology learning. Starting with a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical foundations of ontology learning methods, the edited volume presents the state-of-the-start in automated knowledge acquisition and maintenance. It outlines future challenges in this area with a special focus on technologies suitable for pushing the boundaries beyond the creation of simple taxonomical structures, as well as on problems specifically related to knowledge modeling and representation using the Web Ontology Language. Perspectives on Ontology Learning is designed for researchers in the field of semantic technologies and developers of knowledge-based applications. It covers various aspects of ontology learning including ontology quality, user interaction, scalability, knowledge acquisition from heterogeneous sources, as well as the integration with ontology engineering methodologies.

After years of mostly theoretical research, Semantic Web Technologies are now reaching out into application areas like bioinformatics, eCommerce, eGovernment, or Social Webs. Applications like genomic ontologies, semantic web services, automated catalogue alignment, ontology matching, or blogs and social networks are constantly increasing, often driven or at least backed up by companies like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. The need to leverage the potential of combining information in a meaningful way in order to be able to benefit from the Web will create further demand for and interest in Semantic Web research. This movement, based on the growing maturity of related research results, necessitates a reliable reference source from which beginners to the field can draw a first basic knowledge of the main underlying technologies as well as state-of-the-art application areas. This handbook, put together by three leading authorities in the field, and supported by an advisory board of highly reputed researchers, fulfils exactly this need. It is the first dedicated reference work in this field, collecting contributions about both the technical foundations of the Semantic Web as well as their main usage in other scientific fields like life sciences, engineering, business, or education.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2013, held in Montpellier, France, in May 2013. The 42 revised full papers presented together with three invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 162 submissions. They are organized in tracks on ontologies; linked open data; semantic data management; mobile Web, sensors and semantic streams; reasoning; natural language processing and information retrieval; machine learning; social Web and Web science; cognition and semantic Web; and in-use and industrial tracks. The book also includes 17 PhD papers presented at the PhD Symposium.