Enabling Services for Distributed Environments: Ontology Extraction and Knowledge Base Characterisation

Existing knowledge base resources have the potential to be valuable components of the Semantic Web and similar knowledge-based environments. However, from the perspective of these environments, these resources are often undercharacterised, lacking the ontological and structural characterisation that would enable them to be exploited fully. In this paper we discuss two currently independent services, both integrated with their environment via a brokering mechanism. The first of these services is an ontology extraction tool, which can be used to identify ontological knowledge implicit in a knowledge base. The second service involves characterising a given knowledge base in terms of the topic it addresses and the structure of its knowledge. This characterisation should permit a knowledge base to be located and assessed as a potential candidate for re-use in a more intelligent and flexible manner. The discussion of some related research into brokering systems illustrates the roles that these services can play in distributed knowledge architectures as precursors to problem-directed transformation and reuse of knowledge resources.