Generating ontologies with basic level concepts from folksonomies

Abstract This paper deals with the problem of ontology generation. Ontology plays an important role in knowledge representation, and it is an artifact describing a certain reality with specific vocabulary. Recently many researchers have realized that folksonomy is a potential knowledge source for generating ontologies. Although some results have already been reported on generating ontologies from folksonomies, most of them do not consider what a more acceptable and applicable ontology for users should be, nor do they take human thinking into consideration. Cognitive psychologists find that most human knowledge is represented by basic level concepts which is a family of concepts frequently used by people in daily life. Taking cognitive psychology into consideration, we propose a method to generate ontologies with basic level concepts from folksonomies. Using Open Directory Project (ODP) as the benchmark, we demonstrate that the ontology generated by our method is reasonable and consistent with human thinking.