Finding Appropriate Semantic Web Ontology Terms from Words

The Semantic Web was designed to unambiguously deﬁne and use ontologies to encode data and knowledge on the Web. Many people ﬁnd it difficult, however, to write complex RDF statements and queries because doing so requires familiarity with the appropriate ontologies and the terms they deﬁne. We describe a system that automatically maps a set of ordinary English words to a set of appropriate ontology terms on the Semantic Web. We use the Swoogle Semantic Web search engine to provide ontology terms and ontology correlation statistics, the WordNet lexical database to resolve synonyms, and a practical three step approach to ﬁnd the most suitable ontology context as well as appropriate ontology terms.