Encoding Classifications into Lightweight Ontologies

Classifications have been used for centuries with the goal of cataloguing and searching large sets of objects. In the early days it was mainly books; lately it has also become Web pages, pictures and any kind of digital resources. Classifications describe their contents using natural language labels, an approach which has proved very effective in manual classification. However natural language labels show their limitations when one tries to automate the process, as they make it very hard to reason about classifications and their contents. In this paper we introduce the novel notion of Formal Classification, as a graph structure where labels are written in a propositional concept language. Formal Classifications turn out to be some form of lightweight ontologies. This, in turn, allows us to reason about them, to associate to each node a normal form formula which univocally describes its contents, and to reduce document classification and query answering to reasoning about subsumption.