Automatic construction of a domain-independent knowledge base from heterogeneous data sources

Manual construction and maintenance of general-purpose knowledge bases forms a major limiting factor towards their full adoption, use and reuse in practical settings. In this paper, we present KnowBase, a system for automatic knowledge base construction from heterogeneous data sources including domain-specific ontologies, general-purpose ontologies, plain texts, and image and video captions, which are automatically extracted from WebPages. In our approach, several information extraction techniques are integrated to automatically create, enrich, and keep the knowledge base up to date. Consequently, knowledge represented by the produced knowledge base can be employed in several application domains. In our experiments, we used the produced knowledge base as an external resource to align heterogeneous ontologies from the environmental and agricultural domains. The produced results demonstrate the effectiveness of the used knowledge base in finding corresponding entities between the used ontologies.