PASCAL Ontology Learning Challenge

The aim of this challenge is to encourage work on automated construction and population of ontologies. For the purposes of this challenge, an ontology consists of a set of concepts and a set of instances. An instance can be assigned to one or more concepts. The concepts are connected into a hierarchy. Several types of tasks are included in this challenge:

• Ontology construction: given a set of documents, construct an ontology with these documents as instances.
• Ontology extension: given a partial ontology and a set of instances, extend the ontology with new concepts using the given instances.
• Ontology population: given a partially populated hierarchy of concepts, develop a model that can assign new instances to concepts.
• Concept naming: given a set of instances and the assignment of instances to concepts, suggest user-friendly labels for the concepts.

Evaluation is based on comparing the results to a “golden standard” ontology prepared by human editors.