Automatic Construction of Lightweight Domain Ontologies for Chemical Engineering Risk Management

The need for domain ontologies in mission critical applications such as risk management and hazard identification is becoming more and more pressing. Most research on ontology learning conducted in the academia remains unrealistic for real-world applications. One of the main problems is the dependence on non-incremental, rare knowledge and textual resources, and manually-crafted patterns and rules. This paper reports work in progress aiming to address such undesirable dependencies during ontology construction. Initial experiments using a working prototype of the system revealed promising potentials in automatically constructing high-quality domain ontologies using real-world texts.