Ontologies as facilitators for repurposing web documents

This paper investigates the role of ontologies as a central part of an architecture to repurpose existing material from the web. A prototype system called ArtEquAKT is presented, which combines information extraction, knowledge management and consolidation techniques and adaptive document generation.All of these components are co-ordinated using one central ontology, providing a common vocabulary for describing the information fragments as they are processed. Each of the components of the architecture is described in detail and an evaluation of the system discussed. Conclusions are drawn as to the effectiveness of such an approach and further challenges are outlined.