Knowledge extraction for automatic ontology maintenance

• US 20080097968A1
• Filed: 02/28/2007
• Published: 04/24/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 10/20/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Inventors: Liao, Ciya, Krishnaprasad, Muralidhar, Delgado, Joaquin A.
• Granted Patent: US 7,930,288 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/36 Creation of semantic tools, e.g. ontology or thesauri
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/295 Named entity recognition

Abstract

Systems, methods, and other embodiments associated with extracting knowledge from application data and maintaining an ontology based on the extracted knowledge are described. One example system includes a mapping logic to store mappings between application objects and ontology classes and an information extraction (IE) logic that accesses the mapping logic to identify application data to process based on the mappings. The application data may be stored in application data repositories belonging to an enterprise and may be characterized by the application object. Having identified application data to process, the IE logic may locate data in the application data repositories and selectively manipulate an ontology based on selected application data elements.

Claims

1. A system, comprising:

a mapping logic to store a mapping between an application object and an ontology class; and

an information extraction (IE) logic;

to access the mapping logic to identify an application data element to process based, at least in part, on the mapping between the application object and the ontology class, application data being stored in one or more application data repositories belonging to an enterprise, the application data element being characterized, at least in part, by the application object;

to locate the application data element in the one or more application data repositories; and

to selectively manipulate an ontology based on a value of the data element.

2. The system of claim 1, where the application data repositories store one or more of, emails, content management data, and record management data.

3. The system of claim 1, where the IE logic includes a name entity relation (NER) logic to locate application data elements, the NER logic being controlled, at least in part, by the mapping between the application object and the ontology class.

4. The system of claim 3, the NER logic being configured to generate a gazetteer for an NER object.

5. The system of claim 1, where the IE logic includes a crawler logic to initially crawl the application data to select application data elements upon which the ontology may be manipulated.

6. The system of claim 5, where the crawler logic is configured to repetitively crawl the application data and to selectively update the ontology based, at least in part, on identifying application data elements that have changed since a previous crawl.

7. The system of claim 1, including a semantic link logic to create a semantic link between a document from which an application data element was selected and an application object that characterizes, at least in part, the application data element.

8. The system of claim 1, including a search logic:

to accept a query; and

to locate a document relevant to the query based, at least in part, on the information stored in the ontology, the document being stored in one of the one or more data repositories.

9. The system of claim 7, including a search logic:

to accept a query; and

to locate a document relevant to the query based, at least in part, on the information stored in the ontology and the semantic link, the document being stored in one of the one or more data repositories.

10. The system of claim 8, the search logic to progressively relax the query over one or more ontology elements.

11. The system of claim 1, including a metadata annotation logic to add a metadata annotation to a document from which an application data element was selected, the annotation being based, at least in part, on a value of an ontology element.

12. A method, comprising:

determining a data element to search for in application data based on a relationship between the data element and an element in an ontology;

searching for the data element in one or more data repositories belonging to an enterprise; and

upon locating the data element, selectively updating the ontology.

13. The method of claim 12, the data element storing a value associated with a subject of a relationship between two items.

14. The method of claim 13, the data element storing a value associated with the relationship between two items.

15. The method of claim 12, where searching for the data element includes initially crawling the enterprise to search for the data element.

16. The method of claim 15, including repetitively crawling the enterprise and, upon determining that a data element has changed since a previous crawl, selectively updating the ontology.

17. The method of claim 12, where locating the data element includes performing name entity relationship processing on one or more data elements in the application data.

18. The method of claim 12, including adding a metadata annotation to a document in which a data element was located.

19. The method of claim 12, including establishing a semantic link between a document in which a data element was located and an application object.

20. The method of claim 12, including receiving a query and identifying a document relevant to the query based, at least in part, on the ontology.

21. The method of claim 20, including selectively progressively relaxing the query over one or more ontology elements.

22. The method of claim 20, including identifying a document relevant to the query based, at least in part, on a semantic link.

23. The method of claim 20, including receiving a query and identifying a document relevant to query based on an ontology element value, a semantic link, and a metadata annotation, and including selectively progressively relaxing the query over one or more ontology elements.

24. A machine-readable medium having stored thereon machine-executable instructions that if executed by a machine cause the machine to perform a method, the method comprising:

determining a data element to search for in application data based on a relationship between the data element and an element in an ontology;

searching for the data element in one or more data repositories belonging to an enterprise; and

upon locating the data element, selectively updating the ontology.

25. A system, comprising:

means for crawling enterprise data;

means for identifying data to locate while crawling enterprise data, where the identifying is based on a relationship between application data and ontology data; and

means for selectively updating an ontology based, at least in part, on data located in the enterprise.