Automated Semantic Enrichment of Ontologies in the Construction Domain

Technologies built by the Semantic Web (SW) community are more and more adopted by experts in the Construction domain. Indeed, SW languages like Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Language Ontology (OWL) have been used for various purposes like information modeling, automatic rules’ checking. Their massive adoption is due mainly to their ability to capture deep semantics, their standardization and their large adoption. At the base of semantic applications, we find ontologies. Their construction is time consuming and involves domain experts and SW engineers. It is thus interesting for experts to have tools which could help them enrich automatically ontologies from textual resources. In this paper, we bridge this gap through an approach which aims to provide automatically an OWL expression of a given concept from its natural language definition. This formalization process uses foremost Industry Foundation Classes entities. A first evaluation of this approach gives promising results.