Semantic Relationships Rules Identification for the Construction of Medicinal Herbs Domain Ontology

The primary goal of ontology development is to share and reuse domain knowledge among people or machines. This study focuses on the approach of extracting semantic relationships from unstructured textual documents related to medicinal herb from websites and proposes a lexical pattern technique to acquire semantic relationships such as synonym, hyponym, and part-of relation. The results seven types of concepts (entities), eight object properties (or semantic relations) and twenty lexico-syntactic patterns have been identified manually, including one from the Hearst hyponym rules. The lexical patterns have linked fifty one terms that have the potential as concepts. Based on this study, it is believed that determining the lexical pattern at an early stage is helpful in selecting relevant term from a wide collection of terms from the corpus. However, the relations and lexico-syntactic patterns or rules have to be verified by domain expert before employing the rules to the wider collection in an attempt to find more possible rules. This study shows that background knowledge about the domain is essential to develop the TBox ontology diagram that serve as backbone of the domain ontology. This diagram is essential as guideline in discovering lexico-syntactic patterns therefore expedite the knowledge extraction process.