Converting Classifications into OWL Ontologies

Classification schemes, such as the DMoZ web directory, provide a convenient and intuitive way for humans to access classified contents. While being easy to be dealt with for humans, classification schemes remain hard to be reasoned about by automated software agents. Among other things, this hardness is conditioned by the ambiguous nature of the natural language used to describe classification categories. In this paper we describe how classification schemes can be converted into OWL ontologies, thus enabling reasoning on them by Semantic Web applications. The proposed solution is based on a two phase approach in which category names are first encoded in a concept language and then, together with the structure of the classification scheme, are converted into an OWL ontology. We demonstrate the practical applicability of our approach by showing how the results of reasoning on these OWL ontologies can help improve the organization and use of web directories.