NMARKUP Technology: Description of intro-image What's the Problem? Knowledge engineers often build ontologies based on the information given in an appropriate text. That is the knowledge engineer needs to extract pertinent concepts, attributes, values & relations from the text and organize them into a model (ie an ontology). We have noted 2 significant problems with existing tools: * A single text may not contain all the entities needed to produce a complete model & hence it is vital to allow the modeler to explore several texts or to allow the Knowledge engineer to add entities from his/her own experience. * Most systems only allow users to build a single model/ontology. Whereas a modeler often wishes to develop a family of models & only later select the most plausible one. Towards a Solution * NMARKUP, using the GATE package, processes a text file and highlights all the nouns in the passage. * The Knowledge engineer then used NMARKUP's Ontology building subsystem to select concepts, attributes, values and relationships, and to indicate how they are related. * The Knowledge Engineer can, if he wish, add entities which he thinks are necessary but which are not found in the text. * NMARKUP allows the knowledge engineer create a family of Ontologies * These ontologies can be displayed graphically or as RDF; further they can be saved for development in subsequent sessions. The technology Below we give a diagram of the NMARKUP system: [rev-nmarkup-3b.jpg] The system architecture of NMarkup Note: * GATE produces the information about position of words (POS tags) * NMARKUP comprises 2 sub-modules, namely, NounsMarkup and OntoServlet. We have plans to develop NMARKUP to: * Add a mode which allows the modeller to decide to handle all nouns or only unusual nouns (the later are more likely to be domain-specific concepts) * Once a word/concept has been extracted from a sentence, bring to the Modeller's attention other unusual words in that same line and adjacent lines; * And a variant of the above which allows the user having found an attributes in a line to search the line and adjacent lines for adjectives (ie potential values) * Report verbs which might be functioning in the passage as Relations Try a Demonstration A video which demonstrates the use of NMARKUP is available ([1]VIDEO) Further Reading Key document: Gang Lei (2003) A Web-Based Tool for Developing Ontologies from Texts. Master of Science (by Research), Computing Science, University of Aberdeen. (This is available on-line on request to Derek Sleeman <[2]dsleeman@csd.abdn.ac.uk>) Other relevant documents: H Cunningham, D Maynard, K Bontcheva, V Tablan, C Ursa and M Dimitrov (2003) Developing Language Processing Components with GATE (a User Guide) for GATE version 2.1 (February 2003) [3]http://www.gate.ac.uk/sale/tao/index.html References 1. file://localhost/home/www.aktors/htdocs/dynamic-technology-pages/nmarkup/nmarkup-3.avi 2. mailto:dsleeman@csd.abdn.ac.uk 3. http://www.gate.ac.uk/sale/tao/index.html