Harvesting information from the Internet to construct ontologies

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of harvesting information from the internet to aid in the lowcost construction of an ontology. The paper describes how a proof-of-concept called OntoRanch was built, to harvest information and its relationships to construct an ontology. A systems development methodology was adopted which recognises three main stages: concept development, system building, and system evaluation. The evaluation took an interpretive hybrid approach of using both a focus group and a questionnaire to evaluate the proof-of-concept OntoRanch. The findings show that the approach of reusing information by harvesting it from the internet can provide an effective self-sustaining process that enables ontologies to be constructed in a reduced amount of time and cost.